Customer Case Study: Cbus Superannuation Fund

Solving data challenges and governance objectives

To support the organisation’s growth strategy, United Super Pty Ltd, as Trustee for the Construction and Building Unions Superannuation Fund (Cbus) - responsible for managing over AUD $73 billion of retirement funds for Australians (as at December 2022) - commissioned a new data management platform.^* At the same time, it recognised the need to complete a strategic review of its data governance maturity and identify and prioritise areas in the business requiring improvement. These findings helped the superannuation fund develop a governance framework and implementation roadmap. They could address the challenges and support governance objectives, allowing them to focus on securing value from data and reducing risks and costs relating to data.

“Cbus recognised that a data catalog would provide a central repository of governed metadata, helping to streamline the process to search, understand, trust, and use data. It would also support programs in data quality, data literacy, self-service analytics, and the management and protection of sensitive information,” says John Gilbert, Data Governance Manager at Cbus. “We knew this would accelerate our progress, uplift our maturity, and help the organisation move towards its strategic objectives.”

Delivering value from metadata: Gartner leadership matters

Alation’s continued leadership position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions led Cbus to automatically include Alation in the competitive tender process. Alation’s three key competitive advantages - pure-play data catalog, superior intuitive user interface, and competitive pricing led to its successful selection.

Alation’s Right Start Program accelerated the initial rollout of the data catalog in early 2020 to the analyst community. The catalog enabled new levels of engagement and collaboration for users supporting their data use cases.

Benchmarking data quality and accelerating ROI

Alation creates and maintains an inventory of data assets from its core data and business intelligence (BI) sources (including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Tableau, & Power BI), and maps the relationships between data and other elements of the enterprise architecture, such as applications/systems, processes, services, policies/standards, security classifications, data owners/stewards, retention schedules and data repositories among other things.

The strength of the Alation data catalog is evident in the resolution of early challenges such as siloed data sources, little use of metadata, poor internal data literacy, and no self-service analytics capabilities. Today with Alation, users are more enabled, engaged, and collaborative - sharing insights and fostering a data-driven culture, leading to increased operational efficiency and productivity.

“Alation plays a vital role in protecting our sensitive data,” outlines Gilbert. “Adding the confidentiality classification to data in the catalog and linking the data to policies (e.g. personal data to the privacy policy) ensures that risk management and compliance is ‘front of mind’ and applied across all data life-cycle processes and practices. While we initially identified a core set of challenges and use cases that Alation would solve, we can see a broader application and importance for the data catalog in the current environment.”

Cbus is wanting to leverage its data assets and analytics capabilities to better understand and interact with its members and employers. With the superannuation industry facing continued regulatory scrutiny, deriving actionable insights will help Cbus plan and deliver superior outcomes.

“Our vision is to have an enabled and engaged community of users that consume, collaborate, communicate and contribute,” says Gilbert. “We are starting to see our user base move from being traditional consumers of data to being more collaborative and communicative, and becoming more of a contributor. This is an important first step into developing a strong data-centric culture at Cbus.”

Data management tool integration

For Cbus, the focus is now on facilitating the bi-directional integration of information between the data catalog and other data management tools, such as data quality and analytics and Business Intelligence tools. This will allow them to leverage metadata and evolving new capabilities to augment and automate data governance processes that are traditionally performed manually and time-consuming.

“It is inevitable that there will be updates to protect the accuracy, quality and privacy of the information we hold on our members,” notes Gilbert. “Having a modern data catalog and a fully engaged user community means we are well-placed to deliver on our objectives to increase the confidence and trust in data, improve time to insight, reduce risks and costs, and support regulatory compliance.”

Today, Alation plays an important role for the super fund, absorbing, integrating, and enriching metadata from a variety of sources, and making it available to data consumers to support their data and analytics use cases. It also establishes new levels of collaboration and sharing of information outcomes beyond the initial data catalog implementation to derive valuable business insights.

About Cbus

Established in 1984, Cbus is one of Australia’s top-performing superannuation funds, managing $73 billion in assets for 875,000 members (as of December 2022).^*

^* Read the relevant Cbus PDS & TMD to decide what’s right for you. Call 1300 361 784 or visit cbussuper.com.au