Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Nuclear reactor company NuScale Power is moving to a data-driven system to keep track of the copious documentation that is legally required to be archived in the nuclear power sector. Using a big-data platform provided by HP Enterprise, the company can track and organize critical engineering information to be quickly searched and pared down.

This use of “big data,” or tapping into large new data streams and analytic powers, is providing new methods of assisting compliance, just as it is transforming business operations around the globe. The compliance applications vary widely and often start with a company having to figure out what useful data it has and then organizing it into usable form.

“We were a paper based system before,” said Lionel Wertz, director of corporate services at NuScale. “[Now] I’ll know how long I’ll keep my record for and when I can destroy it.” The company often has to keep track of information for 80 years beyond the lifetime of a reactor.

General Electric Co. has seen big gains in reorganizing the company’s data streams to get a better grasp on its compliance risk assessments, said Alfred Rosa, chief compliance director. The reorganization involved centralizing and streamlining data in specific centers to give GE and its compliance officers an up-to-date view of risks and inefficiencies, he said.

“The benefit from that is really significant, we connect all the processes for the areas we have into a single process,” Mr. Rosa said. “You can change course before getting an audit opinion that is unsatisfactory,” he said.

But many companies haven’t reached the point of being able to make use of their data for more effective compliance. Bob Rogers, chief data scientist for big data at Intel Corp., said nearly every company is looking at ways to increase the use of data in their business operations, but only about half actually have the advanced technology systems to pull in the large amounts of “unstructured” data or data that aren’t usefully organized. Only about a quarter are doing something meaningful with the data, he added.

What’s new and challenging now is the use and massive size of unstructured data, information that isn’t predefined and can’t be holed up in a server for technology specialists to parse through, Mr. Rogers said.

“Unstructured data by its very nature is an inference, it requires context as well as the data itself,” he said.

This broad problem is also being encountered by compliance officers. “Determining what to measure and how to measure it has been a real struggle for compliance leaders,” said Mr. Rosa.

Compliance and data experts say the trick is getting to the point where a company’s technology systems and data streams can can be used efficiently to make sense of those huge amounts of data.

“Organizations are trying to get their arms around all the data that is available to us not for backward testing…but predictive analysis,” said Amy Brachio, a risk expert and partner at Ernst & Young. “The pace of change is really tremendous,” she said.

Since the big data surge took hold in the past decade, most companies have come to realize that they need to take advantage of those assets for their compliance function and across business operations.

Consumer data and information from the Internet of Things and financial data is at the forefront of those data sets. The companies that can tap into their new streams of data stand to see a windfall for improving their daily operations in addition to staying in compliance.

The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ needed to increase its analytic capabilities to stay in compliance with the Dodd Frank regulatory requirements for swap trades. Once the company got a handle on its swap deal compliance, which required identifying all records and events around a trade, the bank realized it could use its new automated system to identify the characteristics behind a good trade.

The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ took those big-data systems and used them to find out which sales practices were working and which weren’t and reshape their sales model around that analysis.

In the past, the computing power to do big data analysis was limited to mega technology companies that could use their scale to crunch numbers and gather information, said Manish Sood, chief executive of data management company Reltio.

But a quickly growing industry of cloud-based data service providers is making those capabilities open to any size firm, he said.

“[Data] is synthesized into a matter that is useful and reliable,” Mr. Sood said. “That’s where the advances are taking place.”

This article was originally published on www.blogs.wsj.com and can be viewed in full

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