Transforming Data Governance with OvalEdge in a Data Mesh Environment

CLIENT’S PROFILE

This leading provider of sportsbook technology serves operators worldwide. Its sportsbook platform offers tailored solutions, including odds compiling, risk management, and intuitive user interfaces. Processing a substantial number of bets annually, the company empowers operators with the tools and expertise needed to stay competitive in the evolving sports betting industry.

THE CHALLENGE

The company faced a significant challenge as their data warehouse expanded rapidly. The influx of requests for custom data, calculations, and metrics created a growing problem: technical debt. The knowledge of how critical metrics were built was becoming fragmented and difficult to trace. A lack of transparency risked leading to time-consuming investigations, particularly when employees transitioned out of the company.

WHY OVALEDGE

When the client sought a data governance solution, OvalEdge stood out due to its superior connectivity and comprehensiveness.

One of the primary reasons for choosing OvalEdge was its out-of-the-box connectors for their primary data warehouse, and BI tools. Many competing vendors lacked these crucial connectors, making OvalEdge a clear frontrunner.

"One of the main reasons we chose OvalEdge over other competitors was the connectors. Not that many competitors have this connector out of the box," the Data Governance Manager recalled.

Beyond connectivity, OvalEdge's comprehensive suite of governance modules, including data catalog, lineage, and business glossary, was essential for their data mesh implementation. This was a significant advantage, allowing them to expand their governance efforts as their data landscape evolved. Even if they didn't require all modules initially, the availability of advanced features ensured that they could adapt to future needs.

"It might be an overwhelming tool with a lot of features and capabilities, and this is a plus," the Data Governance Manager noted. "If you start small and you don't need all the modules from the very beginning, that's fine. We cannot use them all, and we can only use what we need now, but in future time if we need to scale up, if we need to work with other modules with other capabilities, we have them."

SOLUTION

The client leveraged OvalEdge's data catalog and business glossary to streamline the development and governance of their new data products. They simplified the standard data governance approach by implementing a two-role system:

• Business Owner: Acts as the front-facing individual for a domain or business unit

• Technical Owner: Acts as the front-facing person for a technical team

This streamlined approach helped clarify responsibilities and communication channels.

The process begins with business owners documenting glossary terms that serve as blueprints for technical teams. Technical owners then associate these terms with actual metrics in the data catalog, ensuring consistency and clarity.

"We are building data products alongside the documentation part of them," the Data Governance Manager explained. "And one of the first processes in our step-by-step guide of how to build data products, for example, is the business glossary documentation."

Tags were used extensively to track data objects by data product and domain, providing a clear and organized structure. These tags were propagated to the data catalog, facilitating easy object tracking and retrieval, though this process is currently manual.

The service desk module was utilized for managing access requests, while the question wall and in-app notifications fostered collaboration between business and technical teams. The company also utilized the metadata score feature to ensure that all data products met a specific level of documentation (at least 80% metadata score) prior to production deployment.

Business descriptions created in OvalEdge are directly copied to their BI tools, ensuring consistency across platforms and creating a single source of truth for data definitions.

The client has also begun investigating advanced use cases:

• Using the OvalEdge API to automate the "documentation as code" approach, pushing documentation to the business glossary and data catalog from their unified data platform

• Implementing role-based access control, which automatically grants appropriate access to various tools in the tech stack (such as data processing platforms, BI tools, and analytics dashboards) based on roles defined within the data governance system.

"They are relying on these features heavily, collaborating with business owners and having it all in writing on a specific object inside OvalEdge," the Data Governance Manager said, referencing the collaboration tools. "And they are tagging the users with questions, with answers. They are receiving the email notification, so I've set up the email notification for these messages."

OUTCOMES

The implementation of OvalEdge yielded significant benefits for the client, most notably in improved data ownership and tracking. Teams could now quickly identify responsible parties and locate necessary information, reducing the time spent on investigations. Business descriptions and metric formulas were readily available in the data catalog, enhancing data understanding and ensuring a single source of truth across BI tools.

"The biggest benefit here is the actual ownership and tagging of the objects that we govern," the Data Governance Manager confirmed. "This means that whenever someone needs to find out or track down a development team that created something, they can easily track it down using OvalEdge."

The collaboration features within OvalEdge streamlined communication between business and technical teams, reducing reliance on external channels like messaging platforms or email. The tool also acted as a gatekeeper, ensuring that data products met documentation and metadata standards before being deployed to production.

Looking ahead, the client anticipates leveraging OvalEdge's lineage capabilities to gain deeper insights into data sources and destinations.

"The benefit that I see going forward is the lineage part," the Data Governance Manager stated. "So currently, we haven't detailed too much in the lineage part, but this will heavily help developers understand the source and the destination of the data in OvalEdge."

Finally, they expressed appreciation for the OvalEdge support team, highlighting their responsiveness and expertise.

"By the way, another good piece of feedback that I need to share with you guys is huge kudos. Thank you to the support team," the Data Governance Manager shared. "So the support team - Praveen and Sandeep and the guys behind them were fantastic.