Why data strategy is at the heart of BHF’s modernisation journey
From blocked arteries to seamless systems
The British Heart Foundation saves lives – but outdated, disconnected IT systems long held it back. From slow decision-making to missed fundraising opportunities, legacy tech was a roadblock to impact.
While the BHF is unique in some respects, it has something in common with every other modern organisation: “Technology is at the heart and cuts across everything,” says CTO Alex Duncan.
When Alex joined BHF in 2022, she understood a new approach was needed to best help the nearly 8 million people living with heart or circulatory disease in the UK today.
“The IT modernisation journey has probably been going for over 10 years now. They've been on a long journey. Before I joined there was a time where backups weren't being done, and it didn't have quite the same robustness that it should have done.”
Since joining, Alex has transformed her department to become a partner for the business, which began – naturally – with understanding how BHF uses technology.
“We have a really, really large retail estate [of about 700 locations], which obviously technology supports and drives in that sense. On the fundraising side we've got platforms that support the events we do, but also our CRM is very important to us, because understanding who our customers are - whether they're looking for help or wanting to give help - is really, really important.”
‘Know your customer’: Important in every sector
Understanding customers and other stakeholders is one of BHF’s most important missions, but for years its on-prem systems didn’t support that goal. With no system interoperability, the charity didn’t know if the John Smith working in a store was the same as the one who made regular donations, or who took part in the London to Brighton bike ride, or who called the charity for support.
“The stakeholder landscape is very, very different [to a normal company,]” says Alex. “Any individual can wear multiple hats in terms of how they interact with us, which makes it much, much more complex than other organisations I’ve worked in.”
Giving stakeholders a true cross-channel experience – a better experience meaning they are more likely to donate – meant both a technology and cultural change, starting with a rebrand of Alex's own team: from being seen as an IT team to a technology one.
“We've got a customer vision that's powering that technology transformation under the hood. I spend a lot of time saying 'It's not a technology programme that we're doing; it’s a cultural change programme about how we interact with our customers and how we work within BHF.’”
It starts with data...
The hub of that change – which is intended to modernise systems, highlight “proper” data insights and personalise the experience for stakeholders – is a move from legacy on-prem tools to modern cloud-based solutions.
The biggest advantage to this move will be system interoperability, which is currently impossible:
“A lot of our systems internally don't speak to each other... At the moment you've got people who will get a CSV file from one system, e-mail it to Bob in finance, and Bob will upload it into another format in the finance system. It's really, really inefficient.”
BHF is building a data lakehouse using Azure Databricks, which will be “at the heart - pardon the pun - of everything that we do.”
All of BHF’s systems, new and old, will be able to share information through the lakehouse and a new integration layer (also Microsoft: the Common Data Model). That centralised approach will enable a modern approach to data science.
...But it really starts with strategy
But architecture and tech are “the easy bit,” Alex says. The hard part is agreeing a data strategy.
“How do you agree the data definitions? How do you agree where data is going to be mastered? How do you govern that?
“Before, when you were just passing data around on spreadsheets, it didn't really matter; but now, if you're starting to centralise it more and use it more across the different parts of the organisation, how you govern and manage it is going to become a really important part of what we do.”
BHF’s approach is a hub-and-spoke model; the hub being a small, central function with oversight, and each spoke being a different area of the business.
"We want each of the different areas to have the skills they need to be able to ask and answer questions out of the data...rather than create a huge central organisation.”
As technology sits at the heart of the business, data sits at the heart of its technology transformation; and this strategy is driving that data use.
“We could put in all the best systems in the world, but if we don't get that data piece right, it won't work.”