mit case study: learning how to work smarter at psp investments

Center for Information Systems Research (CISR)

© 2010 MIT Sloan CISR

Jeanne W. RossDirector & Principal Research Scientist

[email protected]

Anne QuaadgrasResearch [email protected]

Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) MIT Sloan School of Management

Phone: (617) 253-2348, Fax: (617) 253-4424http://cisr.mit.edu/

The Information Based Organization: Learning how to work smarter at PSP Investments

November 12, 2010

This research was made possible by the support of CISR sponsors and patrons.Peter Reynolds, Cynthia Beath and John Mooney contributed to this research.


© 2010 MIT Sloan CISR2

Working smarter through information managementat PSP Investments

Public Sector Pension Investment Board of Canada, founded 2000– Fiscal Year 2010 Net Assets C$43.6B– Statutory goals: manage funds in the best interests of contributors and

beneficiaries, maximizing investment returns without undue risk of loss How PSP works smarter:

– Focus on clean data enterprise-wide as PSP moves from a diversified to a coordinated operating model

Need to understand full portfolio to manage exposure risk, evaluate opportunities, and measure performance to be effective at active investment management

Need accurate and consistent financial reporting Need consistent transaction and position data for business unit level

analysis and decision making

– Enablers: Enterprise architecture: business function model, business information

model, and enterprise data bus as part of a Service-Oriented Architecture Organization structure and roles: governance, data stewardship,

business integration team and data quality & optimization team



Enterprise architecture models enable separation of processes, information and roles

Business function model (BFM)– Details six business functions, each with a process owner:

public markets; private markets; investments; finance & treasury; process and information management; and enterprise support

– Defines business function boundaries, process decomposition, and process governance; each business function has a process owner

– Shows what information is produced and consumed in each process, ensuring process segmentation and isolation

Business information model (BIM) – includes top-level information domains, with clear boundaries

and data governance model. – Shows how applications are used to perform tasks in BFM.

All business cases must specify how a project impacts BFM and BIM



Examples of top level of Business Function Model and Business Information Model

Source: PSP internal documents, used with permission



Enterprise data bus supports PSP’s data focus Enables data cleaning via PSP rules at the source, so each type

of data exists in only one version and is usable by everyone

– Only master data moves between systems Decouples data from systems and processes, simplifying

changes in any of them Implemented via reusable information services using SQL;

supported by all reporting tools Different from a typical data architecture in which all data goes

to a data warehouse, which leads to a complex logical database interface and tightly coupled systems, processes and data.

Raw data

Clean-

sed data

Master data

Capture, ensure accuracy and timeliness

Apply semantic and quality rules



High Level BFM : processes, systems and datarelationships for one function

Source: PSP internal documents, used with permission



PSP’s organization for working smarter Governance committees for each of the six business functions

– Project governance in accordance with target architecture– Portfolio prioritization which data is cleaned and mastered next

Data quality and optimization team – across the organization– Monitors data quality– Fixes exceptions as per PSP rules

Business integration unit – outside of IT– Data governance (prior experience showed IT should not be responsible for

this)– Oversight of process governance– Has credibility to work with both IT and business groups

Data stewards are accountable for a given piece of information. Is “last gate”: person who must say the data is right; often the producer.– Example: transaction data: trader writes raw transaction, counterparty vets

it to make it a master executed transaction, and back office transforms it into a confirmed transaction. Different entities, so different data, and different stewards, even though in most cases the physical data about the transaction is unchanged.

– External data (e.g. Bloomberg) has no steward, as PSP can’t fix its errors



Working smarter in practice

Engage the business to define information needs– Proactively explain why data, drilldown, and analysis is

important, focusing on real cases– Manage the business’s expectations on timeframes

“Feed” data to the organization– COO requests ad-hoc reports for complex situations that

uses data that he knows exists Show the value of clean data for speedy reports

– E.g., response time if ad-hoc reports had clean data is 10x faster

Make sure the infrastructure is reliable– If IT can’t keep systems running, they can’t be trusted to

implement the new architecture and data capabilities



Benefits to PSP of working smarter Clean, transparent, consistent data entered only once

reduces operational risks Lower data cleaning and maintenance costs, fewer

external data sources, and reuse of services that expose the data reduce operational costs

Fully encapsulated processes, data and systems, which can then be optimized independently increase business agility

More efficient and effective risk management removes need to add staff even as the organization grows

New types of risk analysis are possible with the proper data

Systems are up more because a major cause of failure was bad data

mit case study: learning how to work smarter at psp investments

Technology

transaction data

consistent data

different data

position data

timeframesfeed data

systemsdecouples data

data stewardship

physical data