Home
>
Bhushan Kokate, Data Analytics and AI Lead, MS Amlin

Bhushan Kokate, Data Analytics and AI Lead, MS Amlin

Describe your career to date

I am an Electronic Engineer with an MBA by background. My career journey can be broadly described in three phases:

Early career: I started my career as an Electronic Engineer in one of India’s largest energy utility companies. As an Engineer, I was exposed to early days of microcomputer programming, embedded software, and the use of supervisory control and data acquisition systems to collect real time analogue data through electrical networks enabling control room operators to make timely decisions to run power stations. I was promoted twice and led a team of System and Software Engineers to run the Electronic Data Processing department. These early years taught me the importance of hands-on learning, the need for accurate data, team building, and the value of flawless execution.

Management and Strategy Consulting: I worked for top management consulting firms (IBM and Deloitte) which allowed me to gain experience across industry verticals, lead large digital transformation programmes, shape enterprise data strategies, build networks, and develop the ability to be a trusted advisor to my clients. My experience spans global financial services clients across multiple countries providing advisory and consulting services to top tier investment, retail and commercial banks, and stock exchanges.

Client side: I joined MS Amlin’s Chief Data Office as a Chief Architect to help shape Amlin’s first Chief Data Office organisation, defining the data and analytics strategy and operating model, designing and delivering data architecture and engineering services, and defining Amlin’s overall data maturity vision and roadmap. Prior to this role, I was a Director at Barclays with the responsibility to lead the bank’s largest global data and artificial intelligence (AI) transformation initiative. This role gave me an opportunity to develop a blueprint for Barclay’s first global cloud data platform, build teams, lead the platform implementation, and setup data products (services) for the bank.

Data literacy is a key enabler of the value and impact from data. How are you approaching this within your organisation?

In my view, data literacy is a broad topic. It is a crucial skill to help understand, manage, communicate, and work with data. Although we do not have a dedicated data literacy programme, we are encouraging data literacy by establishing a common data language which Business and Data teams can understand and communicate, increase speciality insurance domain knowledge through internal training programmes, and improve the overall data communication process through well-defined infographics and data visualisation dashboards. We ensure critical data is modelled and communicated in an easily understood format. We are also encouraging data democratisation through governed access to data and data visualisation tooling. We run specialised data quality training internally to all our employees to help them understand the importance and key aspects of data quality. Lastly, we are embedding the principles of data ethics and data privacy by design into our data management and governance standards which help data teams and stakeholders appreciate the value of data and how we govern and handle data.

What stage has your organisation reached on its data maturity journey?

MS Amlin is at an early stage of its data maturity journey. Over the last three years we have started to lay the foundation and frameworks to start to leverage data as an asset. Our maturity journey can be explained through three key data lenses:

Data Management and Governance: We have developed principles and policies which help us govern and manage data, a business glossary and data ownership, data governance framework, and a capability to capture data lineage. Improving data quality, leveraging active metadata and embedding data observability are key topics going forward.

Data Architecture and Engineering: We have started to evolve from a single centralised data warehouse to a semantic lakehouse based cloud data platform architecture (data mesh-aligned). The focus is on developing domain-aligned data products to be offered as services to our clients. This is supplemented by an IT modernisation initiative to move critical workloads and systems to the cloud.

Data Analytics and AI Adoption: In my view, “There is no AI without IA (Information Architecture)”. We are in the early stages of laying a solid data analytics foundation which can help us accelerate our adoption and AI maturity. We are in the process of defining our responsible AI policies and strategy, adoption guidance, architecture principles, and standards for adopting AI.

Bhushan Kokate
has been included in:

100 Brands 2024 (EMEA)

The trusted global collaboration and intelligence platform for data leaders.

DataIQ is a trading name of IQ Data Group Limited
Registered office: 6^th Floor Charlotte Building, 17 Gresse St. London, W1T 1QL