Industry
Tax Services
Engagement Type
Alation Data Catalog Implementation
Opportunity Areas
- Limited visibility into data lineage and data flows across systems
- Inconsistent business terminology and data definitions
- Difficulty in locating and understanding available data assets
- Manual processes for data cataloging and documentation
- Compliance and regulatory reporting challenges
- Lack of a centralized platform for data stewardship activities
Engagement Snapshot
- To begin building out the data catalog, we first identified the business needs a data catalog could help resolve.
- We organized the business needs into use cases. The use cases were written in a narrative fashion and then broken into component parts of technology needed, functionality wanted, users targeted, content needed.
- From the use case component parts, we were able to identify the different metadata objects and their attributes needed to solve the use case. We documented the objects and their requirements in a business requirements document. We demonstrated the relationship between objects by creating a metamodel.
- We built out the objects as described in the business requirements document and in the metamodel in the data catalog. As we built out the framework, we also brought in valuable metadata from stewards in the form of glossaries, code sets, data sets/elements, policies, and meta governance documentation.
- Throughout the project, much effort was spent engaging their data governance office in upskilling working sessions. When there was turnover in their organization, this effort moved to documentation that would also for independent knowledge transfer.
Outcomes
The engagement resulted in the following:
- A functioning data catalog, complete with 3 data sources connected, a BI platform connected.
- Glossary of terms for Data Literacy.
- Data Elements and sets for the initial use cases.
- Code lists for the initial use cases identified.
- Associations between the logical layer and the physical data layer.
- Catalog management information and best practices built into the catalog, no only by the set up but also the inclusion of documentation kept in the catalog.
