AMP is building out a new 'data brain'

AMP is now live with a new open source and cloud-based environment called the ‘AMP data brain’, laying out an 18-month roadmap to integrate all its data sources into the platform.

The AMP data brain comes accompanied with an investment by the financial services giant in “operational roles” embedded throughout the organisation to help drive up data maturity across different business domains, as well as an AMP-wide “data literacy” and training program.

In a video played during Corinium’s data innovation online conference on Friday last week, AMP said it had taken “a quantum step towards our strategic goal to provide digitised and data-driven experiences.”

“In September, we launched the first iteration of our new cloud-based, scaled-out data application platform, the data brain,” it said.

“This single cloud-based platform brings together cutting-edge technologies, cloud computing, big data, and automation. 

“It will allow data to connect and flow in ways that create organisational intelligence to provide digitised and data-driven experiences.”

AMP said the data brain would act as a single, secure source of data and data products, with in-built quality checks and “rich data discovery capabilities.”

“This will support rapid analytics and decisioning and improve transparency to inform current and future business needs, so we provide better tailored products and better informed servicing for our clients,” it said.

“Over the next 18 months, starting with AMP Bank, we will integrate all data sources into one platform.”

AMP did not release specific technical details of the data brain, saying only that it stitches together “contemporary cloud-based architectures based on open source” with some commercial tools such as Microsoft’s PowerBI.

Group chief technology and data officer Jacqui Visch said AMP had procured most elements from the market.

“[It’s about] how do we architect and orchestrate [the pieces] in a way that’s fit for purpose for our organisation - building in the quality, the data, the metadata layers, warehouse data lakes, analytics and reporting - but it’s all based on market tools and capabilities,” she said.

Visch also highlighted the organisation-wide data literacy program currently underway to improve data skills across AMP.

She said that staff are assigned ‘personas’ internally such as data specialist, data leader, data consumer or data evangelist. 

“Based on your persona then we’ll be offering certain levels of training and capabilities,” she said.

“That could be self-paced learning, courses or experiences. 

“The key piece of these literacy programs is to help shift the whole organisation into being much more data-driven and data-aware, from both a mindset and also how they do their work.”