How finding leverage helped a BI team bolster its business

When Brian Jackson joined Texas Tech Credit Union as its business intelligence director in 2018, one of the first things he did was take inventory of all the financial institution’s systems and how they were working together.

What he found was the equivalent of a giant vault, waiting to be unlocked.

“Only about 40% of our systems were integrated,” Brian said during a Domo-sponsored webinar last week. “Even though we had a data warehouse in place, our data was siloed in many ways. We couldn’t easily blend data to get a full analysis, and we didn’t have the flexibility to quickly pull in new data. And some of the data in the warehouse was days old, which made it difficult to see the full picture.”

Fast forward to today and TTCU is in a completely different place. With Brian leading the charge, the organization found its solution with Domo and is leveraging the highly scalable, cloud-based platform to tackle just about anything that comes its way.

“We are now at 95% integration,” Brian said. “But more importantly, we are able to really make sense of our data, through visuals that are elegant and intuitive and empower everyone to find their own insights and to build out things that really move their departments forward.”

During the 40-minute webinar, Brian pointed to a number of examples that support TTCU’s newfound ability to respond to situations with rapid clarity, including one that cropped up during a recent meeting about marketing service agreements.

“Someone wanted to know if a particular service we were paying for was a good use of our marketing dollars,” Brian recalled. “We looked at the data we had available, added a couple data points, and within just a couple of hours our CEO had a page that could do a full analysis on each of the agreements.”

Another area in which TTCU is succeeding these days is in its understanding of how members are interacting with the organization’s various products and services.

“Before we opted to change the way we were doing things, we couldn’t identify where the cross-sell and up-sell opportunities were,” Brian said. “Now we have a member-engagement model that was built on a set of key metrics and makes it easy to see where the opportunities are. The system has really allowed us to achieve one of our long-term goals, which is to grow the credit union without adding new members.”

Issues related to performance-based compensation are much easier to handle now, too.

“It used to be that I’d get stuck in the middle between the employee and HR when there was any kind of discrepancy,” Brian said. “But now everything is so transparent. Employees can see their compensation and the transactions that made up the compensation. This has enabled us to scale out and remove BI from the equation.”

Then there’s COVID-19. As it became clear in late February that the novel coronavirus was spreading to every corner of the world, TTCU’s leadership was forced to make big decisions, fast. But because of the foundation Brian’s team has laid, there was no panic.

“Even though we were facing a complex situation that was evolving by the minute,” Brian recalled, “we were able to build a page that would allow us to monitor the overall health of our organization … in real time. We were able to predict what kind of run there would be on cash, assess our exposure risk to our collateral, prepare for the impact the pandemic may have on our call center, and so much more.”

To learn more about what TTCU is doing with the leverage it now has, and to hear Brian’s advice for BI leaders who may be in the same position he was in a couple years ago, watch a replay of the webinar.