How OvalEdge Revolutionized Data Governance for a Global Consulting Firm

CLIENT’S PROFILE

This global management consulting firm advises businesses, governments, and institutions on strategy, operations, technology, and organization. With a network of industry experts, the firm helps clients tackle complex challenges, optimize performance, and achieve growth. It is recognized for its data-driven approach and collaborative consulting model, which assists clients in navigating transformation and innovation.

CONTEXT

The client wanted to establish complete, end-to-end data governance for their organizational internal data. They categorized their data by the following touchpoints:

1. Data at Source 

2. Data in Warehouse

3. Data in APIs

4. Data in Steaming Systems

As a major management consultant, the company understood that asking stewards to curate the data would be a significant challenge. Instead, they were looking for a solution that would foster data demand. 

They understood that an internal data market was the first use case they should go live with to create demand for the data and encourage data stewards to curate their data better. That’s why integrated data access governance was one of the company’s main requirements.

Upgrading from legacy systems to cloud platforms made streamlining data access with appropriate approvals challenging. To combat this, the company needed to implement a quick, governed, seamless access management feature.

The client recognized the need to establish end-to-end data governance to ensure consistency, compliance, and efficient data management across the organization. As part of this initiative, it set out to identify the right tools to support its data governance strategy. This led the firm to initiate a tool selection process involving 16 vendors, eventually narrowing this selection down to four candidates. 

These top contenders were subjected to a rigorous proof-of-concept (PoC) evaluation, using defined use cases that enabled the firm to assess each tool's capabilities and suitability for its needs. Ultimately, the company decided to prioritize data demand over data curation because data curation would only be effective if there was a clear demand for data. 

WHY OVALEDGE

The firm decided to select OvalEdge as its data governance vendor because of its completeness and ability to integrate seamlessly with various systems, including S3, Kafka, Snowflake, and APIs. Integrating with OvalEdge provided the firm with a comprehensive view of the data flow throughout the organization, enabling it to trace data lineage and understand how data moved across different platforms.

Another significant advantage of OvalEdge was its ability to automate previously manual processes, such as data source onboarding. Additionally, OvalEdge's data curation functionality was essential, and its AI-powered features enabled automated data classification, which the company plans to implement.

Finally, the company is leveraging OvalEdge to integrate its homegrown data quality management system, further ensuring effective governance and compliance across the organization.

SOLUTION

OvalEdge played a crucial role in transforming the firm's data governance process.  OvalEdge’s data catalog feature enabled it to tag and structure its data more effectively, centralizing previously scattered data across multiple systems.

As a strategic management consultancy, the company understands that users are generally reluctant to curate information unless there is a genuine demand for its consumption. With this strategic approach in mind, it recognized the importance of identifying use cases where customers actively seek data discovery opportunities.

One key use case for data discovery was facilitating data access. OvalEdge enabled the client to automate data access, transforming what was once a clunky, slow process into something far more streamlined and efficient.

Along with integrating the data catalog, the system was designed to incorporate access provisions seamlessly across multiple data sources. This enabled the firm to onboard its enterprise data warehouse in the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, enterprise APIs, various Kafka topics, and S3 buckets containing different domain data, such as HR and finance databases, without manual intervention.

This automation sped up the onboarding process and increased overall efficiency. With these automated processes, access requests that previously took weeks could now be completed in minutes. There is also a reprovisioning program that requires individuals to seek reapproval for access after a certain period, bolstering security protocols.

After successfully integrating its data sources and implementing access management provisions, the company’s focus shifted to data curation. With OvalEdge, the firm has brought all of this data together in a centralized manner. Additionally, with the help of AI, much of the data curation was automated, simplifying what could have been an otherwise time-consuming process.

Another vital feature of OvalEdge is its data lineage capabilities, which enabled the consulting firm to trace data flow across different systems, such as S3, Kafka, SAP, and Snowflake. This visibility was essential for data validation and ensuring the data's integrity as it moved between systems at the column and attribute levels.

OvalEdge also helped the organization implement a robust data quality framework. Through a user-friendly dashboard, the firm could schedule jobs to extract quality metrics from its data quality engine, define rules for specific data columns, and receive a quality score for each data object. This data quality framework enables users to establish rules, see results for each data object, and maintain data security with all internal data remaining in its original system.

Data classification was another critical use case, enabling the organization to classify sensitive data and implement stricter access controls. From a data privacy perspective, using governed data queries, OvalEdge could identify specific data classification requests, such as the right to delete, and communicate those back to the organization for action.

Using a color-coded system, the company classified data into different sensitivity levels, with specific workflows for each classification. On this scale, green represents public data; yellow indicates semi-public data requiring minimal approval for access; red signifies high-level access is needed; and purple means the data is only available to the security team. 

OvalEdge helped identify and classify Personally Identifiable Information (PII), allowing the firm to maintain compliance with data privacy regulations. To date, the company has classified its People domain, which has approximately 500 terms in its business glossary, with other domains in the pipeline.

OUTCOMES

The implementation of OvalEdge’s data governance solution resulted in substantial improvements in three main areas: self-service access, data literacy, and compliance. 

Previously, obtaining access to data was a lengthy and manual process with email and Slack communications that could take weeks. With OvalEdge in place, this process was streamlined, enabling access to be granted in just minutes to over 45,000 employees. This improvement in access management benefited around 1,000 users monthly, approximately 500 authors, and 550 viewers, providing them with a quicker and more efficient way to interact with enterprise data. 

Another important outcome was the centralization of data governance. Before implementing OvalEdge, the responsibility for data governance was spread across various teams, creating confusion about data ownership. With OvalEdge, the firm could designate governance owners for each data asset, significantly improving the efficiency and transparency of the process.

As the solution's adoption increased, the firm was able to achieve better compliance with both internal policies and external regulations. Additionally, the introduction of OvalEdge facilitated the company's transition to the cloud, allowing for optimal use of the tools.

THE WAY FORWARD

Data governance practices have continued to improve, particularly with the increased use of AI for data curation and privacy rights management. The company is now focusing on further curation activities, moving beyond the People domain and into other areas such as finance. 

Additionally, the firm plans to expand OvalEdge’s capabilities by introducing new features, such as access provisioning at a granular level using automated data masking for Snowflake and the implementation of the right-to-forget process, which will help the company manage PII by automatically identifying and deleting sensitive data.