When is a fast food company not just a fast food company?
The answer: When they’re also a real estate and technology behemoth.
McDonald’s doesn’t just serve food to 69 million people across 115 countries. “They have the largest real estate portfolio in the world,” Expleo Information Technology Management Consultant David Tischler says. “They’re also a technology company.”
The fast food giant determines where to open its next restaurant by anticipating where its customers will be. But the strategy is anything but slapdash, David explains. “They’re putting technology into every aspect of the customer journey. They have one of the largest loyalty programs in the entire world. They need to know who the customer is, what their preferences are, and how to maximize lifetime value.”
As a longstanding Collibra partner, Expleo has worked with McDonald’s for the last three years on implementing data governance and AI governance to drive the company’s expansion. Two McDonald’s leaders behind the project, Director of Enterprise Data Governance John Tucker and Senior Manager of Global Data Governance Stephanie Giardina, stopped by Data Citizens 2024 to reveal the secrets of their playbook.
The importance of AI governance
When McDonald’s first teamed up with Expleo, AI governance wasn’t part of the plan. “All that stuff didn’t exist a year ago, so it’s been quite a journey,” David says. It did have data to manage, however.
McDonald’s currently boasts 40,000 restaurants with a crew of 2.2 million employees and franchisees worldwide. “By 2027, we really want to get to 50,000 restaurants,” John says. “In order for us to do that, we have to transform. We have to think about how we operate our businesses, how we can create efficiencies using AI, but also how that impacts the customer journey — how they’re experiencing the services that we have.”
McDonald’s focused its strategy around a simple three-letter abbreviation: MCD.
- Maximize marketing: With a focus on brand and affordability
- Commit to the core: Burgers, chicken, and coffee are star products for McDonald’s
- Double down on the 4 Ds: Delivery, digital, Drive Thru, and restaurant development
There could be one more “D” to add to the four: data. Data is what drives the McDonald’s expansion. “It’s getting faster [and] better thanks to all these supercomputers [and] the storage — but also the data that’s available to us today that wasn’t there back in 1958,” John points out.
Keeping pace with these rapid developments required a proper AI governance model (to go with the right data governance model already implemented). McDonald’s harnesses the power of AI with a two-pronged strategy consisting of a:
- Highly cross-functional team incorporating enterprise data analytics and AI, legal, global technology, data governance, and global comms and impact
- Mission to accelerate AI safely by implementing AI governance, establishing the use case development platform (Collibra), and fast-tracking its speed-to-value creation
Layering AI governance over data governance makes it possible to improve customer and employee experiences in tandem to accelerate the company’s expansion.
Speeding down the Runway with Collibra
Collibra forms the basis for Runway — McDonald’s internal name for its unified data and AI governance foundation. It’s the company-wide dictionary for data, technology, and governance processes.
Reference catalogs are useful for data users at McDonald’s, but how users look for the data — how it’s served up to them in a consumable format — is just as important as the catalogs themselves. “Out of this, we started on a 60-day journey and got quick speed to market,” John says.
Implementing 115 different instances of Collibra for each of the company’s worldwide markets would be onerous, which is why McDonald’s created a federated operating model relying on a single instance — but with versions in each market’s native language.
Because of the number of platforms and systems McDonald’s relies on, the company is also looking at data access governance to assist new employees with accessing reports and making its data help desk ticket system more efficient. “We’re trying to bring in all of these various different integrations and serve that same information back up within the Collibra platform,” John explains.
How Collibra enables the McDonald’s foundation and why governance matters
Data and AI are intertwined: Organizations can’t really integrate one without the other. Collibra offers McDonald’s a foundation that helps it govern both, for the benefit of customers, crew members, and its own growth and expansion. McDonald’s governs data with four key goals:
- Understand what data exists and where, “not only reducing speed to discovery, but also generating and accelerating speed to insight for overall model development,” Stephanie clarifies.
- Extend and enrich ownership and accountability from data stewardship into the AI model catalog, including both business decision-making ownership and technical, project-based perspectives.
- Establish data quality by using external tools with custom integrations that define business thresholds that are coded into data quality rules and fed into Collibra for visibility. “Not only can we see the data quality scores for underlying AI model data sets, but we can also establish more business rules through an intake workflow within Collibra,” Stephanie explains.
- Support data privacy, risk, and protection teams to “enrich the overall data taxonomy across the McDonald’s landscape,” Stephanie says — not just the normal asset model for business and technical metadata, but also risk metadata attributes to ensure compliance, brand protection and loyalty, and risk mitigation.
McDonald’s governs AI as follows:
- Register: The AI model catalog is a one-stop shop for all in-house, vendor-enabled, and commercialized AI models. This makes it easy to search for different personas — from business, data science, or risk and legal compliance teams — and types of attributes, providing full access and visibility across McDonald’s from one central place.
- Assess: This covers the risk assessment and outcomes of particular model use, as well as the underlying data sets and quality, asking whether they are accurate and reliable. The robust risk assessment process at McDonald’s checks vendors, data, use cases, and potential AI impact to establish whether new technology should be leveraged and which use cases apply.
- Manage: If a model is approved to be in production, it must be visibly managed and governed through its lifecycle — from ideation and proof of concept to development and post-production — with accountabilities, workflows, tasks, and reviews nailed down.
So, why does this matter? The dual governance approach for data and AI enhances decision-making and operational efficiency through AI models’ cataloging, life-cycle management, and integrated risk assessments — aligning with McDonald’s strategic AI governance objectives.
Collibra and Expleo: A foundation for data and AI governance
What the McDonald’s experience with Collibra and Expleo shows is that responsible data and AI governance is the key to unlocking a variety of business use cases.
McDonald’s identified its top use cases, then leveraged and customized Collibra to figure out the rest. “This is an ever-evolving [process] where we learn quickly, innovate, and figure out solutions with new data,” John explains.
But this wouldn’t have been possible without a solid foundation.
“Whether that’s the foundation of your stewardship and getting the accountability and the engagement of the business up front, or building the foundation in Collibra, both take a bigger, more holistic vision than the most obvious use cases,” David highlights.
The journey reveals that businesses should:
- Do their homework, retaining a data stewardship focus
- Engage stakeholders early and understand broader use cases
- Select tools (and partners) to achieve specific goals
- Use tools to build a foundation that enables the vision
- Test, learn, iterate, and accelerate
By pushing and innovating further, Expleo and Collibra helped McDonald’s serve up its AI governance module quickly and freshly, just like its burgers.
***
This article is based on McDonald’s and Expleo’s discussion at the Data Citizens 2024 conference in Orlando, FL, bringing together the world’s most innovative community of data leaders to experience breakthrough solutions. Collibra puts reliable, high-quality data in the hands of healthcare data citizens.
