In today's data-driven world, your credit union's valuable information is likely scattered across multiple systems, making it difficult to analyze. To gain meaningful insights from your data, it's essential to invest in building a data pipeline—a system that prepares your data for analysis and helps you unlock its full potential.
What is a Data Pipeline?
A data pipeline is a series of steps that move and transform data from various sources into a format that’s ready for analysis. Think of it as a pathway that takes raw data, cleans it up and delivers it to the right tools for decision-making.
Data pipelines can vary in complexity. They can be simple or include advanced systems that manage data in real time. Whether your data comes from databases, applications or devices, a well-built pipeline ensures it flows smoothly to analytics systems.
Why Are Data Pipelines Important?
Without a data pipeline, your data sits in silos and is often unorganized. By automating data collection, transformation and delivery, a pipeline makes it easier to gather insights and make informed decisions.
How Does a Data Pipeline Work?
- Automation: Automates repetitive tasks, ensuring data is consistently processed and ready for analysis
- Data ingestion: Gathers data from various sources, such as apps or devices, securely and efficiently
- Data transformation: Ensures the data is accurate, cleansed and in the right format for analysis
- Delivery to analytics systems: Sends data to a location (e.g., data warehouse or analytics tool) for insights
Governance: Keeping Your Data Safe and Reliable
Data governance is about maintaining data quality and security throughout the entire pipeline. It involves monitoring, auditing and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations. For credit unions, this means keeping member data secure while ensuring that the data used for decision-making is accurate and trustworthy. Here are the key aspects:
- Data quality: Ensuring the data is accurate, complete and reliable
- Data security and privacy: Protecting data from unauthorized access and ensuring privacy
- Compliance: Adhering to legal and regulatory requirements
- Integration complexity: Reducing the complexity of integrating different data sources
- Maintainability: Ensuring the data pipeline is easy to maintain and update
- Availability and deliverability: Making sure data is available when needed and delivered to the right place
The Role of Your Data Team
Building a strong data pipeline requires collaboration between business and tech teams. Key roles include:
- Data architects: Design the overall data strategy.
- Data engineers: Build and maintain the pipeline.
- Data analysts & scientists: Use the pipeline to extract insights for business decisions.
- Data stewards: Ensure data quality and compliance.
- Data custodians: Manage the systems that store and process data.
How Do I Get Started?
Start by identifying where your data is and where you need it to go. From there, work on building your data team, either through traditional hiring methods or by partnering with a talent services provider. While hiring your own team will allow you to keep all processes in house, utilizing a specialized talent services provider may be more cost effective and allow for scaling as needs change and the project progresses.
Bill Fogg is the AVP, Enterprise Architecture at ProBridge.
