Chemist Warehouse builds data maturity to underpin AI goals

Chemist Warehouse is setting itself up to use AI and other emerging technologies by uplifting its data maturity, including lineage and governance, across the organisation.

Image credit: Chemist Warehouse

The retailer, which recently merged with Sigma Healthcare, is using Alation software to implement a data governance framework that it designed in conjunction with a partner.

Data strategy and governance manager Dili Fernando told a Gartner Data and Analytics Summit that the retailer faced "fast changing customer needs" and intended to "use advanced technologies" such as AI to satisfy them.

"We need to be on top of how we meet changing demands and pivot quickly as well," Fernando said.

"As industrial leaders have always done, one of the best ways for us to do it is to leverage acailable technologies that enable us to do that - and the hot topic at the moment is AI.

"There's a lot of business value that AI adds, like faster time-to-insight, risk mitigation, improved decision making - I can keep going on.

"For us to be able to do that, we need to have the foundational [data] layers right first."

To lift its internal data maturity, Chemist Warehouse has embarked on a data governance uplift.

It is implementing this business domain by business domain, and work could take up to 36 months to complete.

The company is engaging subject matter experts in each business domain, who may already be performing some sort of data governance as part of their role, and giving them access to Alation to standardise and centralise definitions, metadata, lineage and other governance information.

The domain approach, of having data stewards and data owners, is helping to ensure that new governance standards also get implemented and enforced across the organisation.

"What happens when you have those specialised skills is you have a more comprehensive oversight of your metadata for that portfolio, and also you can ensure things like your data governance principles ... are upheld through the application of your data policies, continuous monitoring and improvement of your data quality, risk mitigation actions, and also resolution of any issues that are identified because those data owners and stewards in those specific data domains are the subject matter experts," Fernando said.

"Also, say in your organisation there is a data issue that has been identified - and that issue might not just relate to one domain, it might be across a few - what this approach encourages is the collaboration across business units that didn't use to exist.

"The collaboration that the data domain approach has given us has been great."

Once completed, the data governance effort will ensure data "is well understood in the organisation; that it is accessible and discoverable, [and that] we can manage and monitor data all day, every day if we needed to."

That will create a "launchpad" for Chemist Warehouse to start delivering "creative innovations" in the data and AI space, with "fast time-to-delivery and sustainable success", Fernando added.