Chief Manager, Information Management

(Commonwealth Bank of Australia - Feb '98 to Feb '00)

Role

Simultaneously with the Program Director, Group Information Program role, managed a team of Information Management professionals spanning Data Warehousing, Market Research, Customer Profitability and Data Integrity disciplines. Team was about 30 people.

Major Achievements

  • Devised a program of operational and development activities and then established and managed a supporting budget in excess of $10m.
  • Negotiated with a range of current and potential vendors including EDSA (outsourced IT provider), NCR (data warehouse and related professional services) and Wallis Consulting (advertising monitoring service).
  • Built a highly respected team comprising marketing specialists, IT and data management specialists, and career bankers.
  • Led team of Data Warehouse experts who:
    • maintained, upgraded and enhanced a customer-centric NCR Teradata Warehouse, which held over a terabyte of data for 6 millions customers and more than 40 products. The largest single table held over 1 billion rows.
    • provided extracts for over 300 direct marketing campaigns.
    • performed 300 ad-hoc analyses to support various business initiatives.
    • built an analytic framework for providing regular information to Segment Managers.
    • provided data for the Bank's first-ever segment-based reports to Board.
    • built and developed an 'event-based' leads system (SUN system running an Oracle database)
  • Led team of Market Research experts who:
    • designed and implemented a range of research programs to provide insight to Segment Managers and other key Business Units.
    • provided information to areas across the Group from a number of regular monitors (advertising, communication and banking behaviour).
    • conducted over 100 research projects to support key Bank initiatives, ranging from product positioning to customer satisfaction and advertising effectiveness
  • Led team of Customer Profitability and analysis experts who:
    • completed a range of sector and segment profiling and analysis projects.
    • built and refined models to predict customer balances, profitability and likelihood to defect.
  • Led team of Customer Information experts who:
    • launched a comprehensive program of activities designed to improve the quality of customer information held by the Bank.
  • Collectively, these teams were those responsible for implementing the algorithms defined in Group Information Program projects, and for ultimately realising the $5-10m of marketing efficiency benefits outlined in the achievements for the Program Director role.
  • Had formal and informal involvement in a variety of internal projects, drawing on own long-standing expertise in customer information and segmentation (eg value proposition development, alliance strategies and distribution strategies). Typically, these projects were sponsored by the heads of the various business units and were strategic.
  • Invited presenter on segmentation and data management to participants of the Bank's internal Banking Diploma (run under Macquarie University's auspices) in 1998 and 1999, and to Australian Direct Marketing Association students at Monash University in 1998.