RBS: crisis means organisations are focusing on data architecture

RBS head of data architecture speaks at Computing's Big Data Summit in London today.

The financial crisis means that businesses are at last taking data architecture seriously, a data architecture specialist at trouble-hit Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has said.

Speaking to delegates at the Computing Big Data Summit 2012, Colin Gibson (pictured), head of data architecture for the markets and international banking division of RBS, said the onus was increasingly on companies in general, and the financial services sector in particular, to take information from disparate systems and provide insight into potential crises.

But Gibson warned that extracting the most value from your data, regardless of its quantity, depended on understanding your current state. "How can you extract the most value from your data if you don't understand what it means?

"We have 15 sources of transactional information and five consolidation systems, which equals 75 opportunities for data inconsistency. Conforming to the same messaging standard isn't enough," he said.

The banking group has spent the past 18 months indulging in what he described as "data archaeology" to create a knowledge base as it moves towards an agreed target state for how data is sourced, stored and shared.

Gibson told delegates that the big data challenge is: "a journey; you will never be finished.

"A combination of content and awareness is starting to pay off. Our ultimate challenge is keeping data in the store and bringing it together using virtualisation on demand."

• Just yesterday, the chairman of the Treasury Committee branded the meltdown of RBS's computer systems "completely unacceptable".

• An in-depth report on the Big Data Summit will appear in next week's print issue, and a range of video interviews will be available on this site next week.