Data driven- IT operations in banking

The context

A leading Belgian bank set out to make its IT operations data driven to improve efficiency, delivery speed, and customer service. This initiative is part of a broader IT strategy built on five pillars: Automate to Accelerate, Cyber Resilience, Employee Experience, Open Architecture, and Innovation. The “data-driven” pillar focuses on understanding IT team performance, accelerating decision-making, and prioritizing future projects, while ensuring strict compliance with GDPR through encryption, anonymization, and controlled access to sensitive data.

The logic

Fragmented data and manual reporting slowed decisions and obscured performance signals. Leadership needed reliable KPIs, clear visualizations, and automated pipelines to feed analytics and dashboards—all within the bank’s highly regulated processes involving multiple teams and approvals.

The solution

We addressed this challenge by focusing on three coordinated workstreams.

• First, we worked on the productivity use case, to get insights on the productivity of the IT department. This means extracting datasets, identifying actionable KPIs, computing them, and creating visualizations for stakeholders, while highlighting organizational changes needed to embed productivity measures.
• Second, we consolidated organizational data, mapped cross dataset links, and visualized missing links and data quality issues for remediation.
• Third, our data engineers focused on building the foundation for secure and regulated data flows. This involved setting up pipelines to feed the newly created data lake, ensuring all data is stored exclusively in a secured third-party cloud service (AWS S3).

We also defined development and deployment standards for these pipelines, coordinating across multiple teams to align with strictly regulated data transfer processes. A framework has been established, and the first pipelines have been developed and tested using dummy data while awaiting production data in the lake.

Next steps in applied excellence

The next steps focus on moving from dummy to production data by activating source-to-lake feeds and switching dashboards to live datasets. These data-driven insights will give visibility into IT team activities, improve decision-making, and enable effective prioritization of upcoming projects.