nib Group is an ASX100 health insurance company. It provides private health insurance and medical insurance to over 1.5 million Australian and New Zealand residents. Additionally nib is Australia’s third largest provider of travel insurance, providing travel insurance directly and through a global distribution network. nib has employees in Australia, the UK, USA and Ireland.
Lack of visibility into a growing data ecosystem
Moving from a legacy system to a modern data warehouse solution including Snowflake, dbt, Fivetran and Tableau, allowed nib to have multiple business areas working from the same tooling.
nib’s data models and products have been growing fast and nib’s data product portfolios include business lines across countries and jurisdictions that creates additional complexity with compliance, resilience and data sovereignty.
The nib data team is responsible for the management of large datasets including over 10,000 data tables in Snowflake. The data teams are set up in squads aligned to business lines to establish subject matter expertise and improve efficiency. This helped progress work on data products but the business needed help to find the data it wanted, understand transformations and the sources of the data.
“There was more interest from the business to learn from our data but that raised more questions given the complexity of the data models. Questions such as; which claims dataset should I use, has it been tested or validated, where can I find the data I want, were all common questions for the data team” said Mat Finch, Head of Data & AI at nib.
To address these challenges, nib identified several key issues:
As a health insurer, nib works under stringent regulations around data privacy and security, such as APRA (Australian Prudential Regulation Authority). Ensuring compliance requires meticulous data management and governance, adding another layer of complexity to nib's challenges.
Lastly, nib also faced the challenge of aligning business units and data teams with a unified approach to data management. Different departments had varying levels of data literacy and access needs, making it difficult to implement a standardized solution across the organization. This fragmentation can often lead to inefficiencies and miscommunication, further complicating data management.
These challenges highlight the need for a comprehensive data discovery and governance solution. nib needed a solution that could help nib see the lineage of its data at a granular level and identify redundant datasets immediately.
It [Select Star] makes understanding how a model works significantly quicker (from) being able to track the lineage and review the code. Select Star quickly became our first port of call
Data Manager at nib
Self-service discovery powered by automated metadata insights
nib partnered with Select Star to tackle these challenges, leveraging its robust data discovery and lineage features to enhance data management practices. The implementation included several key components:
nib found Select Star’s user-friendly interface catered to both technical and non-technical users, helping bridge the gap between data teams and business users and improving data literacy and collaboration across the organization. Select Star’s automated documentation and reporting features further simplified data management tasks, allowing teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine maintenance.
The evaluation process for Select Star involved a thorough comparison with other leading data discovery and governance tools from Gartner’s magic quadrant. nib's decision-makers prioritized features such as ease of use, depth of data lineage insights, ability to automate data ingestion and the being able to handle complex data environments. Select Star stood out due to its ability to provide column-level lineage, intuitive interface, and strong support for data governance.
Data Manager at nib
90% increase in efficiency and transparency / trust in data
The deployment of Select Star at nib led to significant improvements across various facets of their data management processes:
With Select Star, nib has noticed an important shift in the data culture. Teams became more proactive in their data management practices, leveraging the insights provided by Select Star to drive innovation and efficiency. The improved data governance and visibility also contributed to higher confidence in data-driven decision-making across the organization.
nib also noted a significant improvement in compliance with regulatory standards and ensuring better protection of customer information. This compliance was essential for maintaining customer trust and meeting industry standards.
nib has found Select Star to be very open to product feature ideas and have been working as a partnership to get even more value from the product and nib’s looks forward to seeing the continuous development of features with each new release.
Overall, Select Star transformed nib's data management, making it more efficient, transparent, and manageable, ultimately supporting their mission to deliver exceptional service to their members.
