Building the Data Route Map for a Passenger Bus Company

Overview

Castlebridge worked with the Data Protection Officer and the Senior Management Team of a transport operator to help navigate a route from their legacy levels of data management maturity to a desired target destination in an environment faced with regulatory and operational challenges and a need to evolve and improve its use of information for the benefit of its passengers and the wider community.

The Pain Point

The client was a transport operator servicing both commercial and ‘public service’ routes. Faced with a challenging commercial environment and a range of regulatory changes affecting their operations, they were looking to understand the issues and risks inherent in their existing data management practices and develop a strategy for improving internal efficiencies, external reporting, and ensure appropriate governance was in place for data assets in the organisation so that regulatory obligations such as GDPR compliance could be met.

Add to that the need to ensure clarity on the objectives and governance role of a newly appointed Data Protection Officer and the client had a number of challenges to address.

The challenge was knowing where their journey needed to start, identifying the destination they were heading for, and working out the stops along the way.

The Plan

The client needed a rapid and evidence based appraisal of how their current data management capability and levels of data literacy in the organisation would support their business strategy and their statutory obligations. They also needed to define and implement an appropriate governance model for information as an asset of the organisation that would align with and support other internal process and work practice modernisation initiatives such as the development of a formalised Project Management Office for business and IT change projects. Finally, an appraisal of the role profiles and knowledge/skill gaps that would need to be addressed in the organisation’s staff to help them engage with an execute the types of operational and strategic changes around data management that were necessary or were envisaged by the organisation would be needed.

Castlebridge mapped data capability requirements to support the stated business strategy and external statutory and regulatory requirements that the organisation had to deliver on.

We assessed the data management maturity of the organisation to determine where their strengths and weaknesses lay, what opportunities could be tapped into, and what threats to their business objectives would need to be mitigated. This included assessing the attitudes and awareness of staff to data and information related issues and accountability culture for information in the organisation.

From this a structured roadmap was developed to address Data Governance and Data Management challenges identified, with an emphasis in the short term on ensuring appropriate governance and controls were in place over personal data, but with a broader remit to ensure data quality, support operational efficiencies, and improve efficiencies in internal and external reporting.

The Outcome

The client was presented with a detailed roadmap for a coherent data strategy and a robust but achievable plan for implementing effective data governance controls to align and focus the organisation’s management of and utilisation of its information assets. Castlebridge continues to support the client with the implementation of elements of this roadmap while others have been subsumed into the wider organisation change framework following internal restructuring.