Nexus Cognitive's EZ Governance managed service offering provides an honest broker approach in supporting your organization's enterprise data management. Our service leverages a combination of subject matter experts and software to facilitate a collaborative, well-organized data infrastructure.
We aim to provide one program to drive the management of your Data Catalog, Data Access Management, Privacy Compliance, Lineage/Impact Analysis, Data Literacy, and Quality needs.
Case #1 – Data Catalog
Data Catalogs are generated by leveraging an automated approach within your existing metadata. Our goal is to allow stakeholders to understand data from sources dispersed throughout your company. A financial services organization identified the need to migrate from a massive data warehouse to Snowflake. The business wanted to avoid the issues with its current data warehouse by understanding each data element, definition, usage, and source system.
The organization started by leveraging a Data Governance software package to support this migration by creating a Data Catalog. This catalog helped the team migrate to a cloud-based Snowflake solution, making it easier for multiple team users to share and collaborate information. The result allows this organization to understand its data holistically by documenting and collaboratively agreeing on accurate definitions. It also provided an understanding of relationships and data lineage. The team can now leverage natural language search to find specific data sets in the new Snowflake environment and have confidence in using this information.
Case #2 – Data Access Management
Our service offering around Data Access Management aims to implement a shopping cart experience for your end-users with Central Control. By leveraging software, we provide a human-assisted, AI-driven approach to support data management via different groups and give access to different roles. The process allows for classifying millions of attributes into PII, Confidential, and Secret. We support your need to manage access to multiple data platforms using unified policies centrally.
An example of how this is used in practice is a company building its data lake in Snowflake, bringing in data from dozens of sources. The challenge was determining how to provide access to resources across the organization to PII and confidential data. This organization leveraged a software-driven approach to classify data and configure their access policies within the software with the ability to transfer these policies into Snowflake automatically.
Case #3 – Privacy Compliance
Our goal with Privacy Compliance is to be able to support our clients need to be compliant with privacy laws such as GDPR and CCPA. This includes creating a PII data report for your auditor, including all PII data, its lineage, responsibilities and more.
An example of this in use is a client that has a micro-service architecture with dozens of teams and over 200+ databases. Finding personally identifiable information across the millions of attributes is the first challenge. Our process does not stop once this has been defined, the software and our processes continuously monitor the database to alert teams when new personal information is found.
Case #4 – Lineage / Impact Analysis
Data engineers must be able to understand the impact of changes to your schema by environment. Understanding the data flow at the schema, table and column levels and identifies changes impacting analytics and key decision support metrics. Notifying stakeholders of these changes in a timely manner keeps your decisions based off high-quality information. Data warehouses, ETL tools and front-end reporting solutions all must be supported to provide a comprehensive understanding of impactful changes.
Companies we support commonly have '1000's of custom reports across multiple platforms. Companies commonly uses dozens of tools and manual analysis to determine the impact of changes to data structures. Replacing those tools and processes with a managed service driven by a single software solution has helped out clients understand the impact of small database changes to larger system upgrades.
Case #5 – Data Literacy
Data Literacy is solved by creating a structured program to create and operationalize a Business Glossary. Our goal as the honest broker is to drive agreements across the organization on term definitions and any associated formulas. After an initial business glossary is created leveraging software and existing metadata, our first step is to identifying gaps and inconsistencies to be resolved via coordination with data stewards and business stakeholders.
Our clients gradually transition each subject area from internal knowledge resources to curated, published enterprise business glossary. Leveraging EZGovernance’s software driven program allows large corporations to create a business glossary and data catalog from '10's of thousands of reports across hundreds of databases. This allows companies to understand their critical data assets, conduct impact analysis to find relevant data, and identify potential cross-functional issues. To achieve this result our managed governance process establishes and facilitates domain-based committees and manages the standardization process reducing data driven technical debt.
Case #6 – Data Quality
Data quality consists of accuracy, completeness, integrity, consistency, validity, and timeliness. Implementing a proactive as well as reactive improvement protocols via a rules driven approach alerts decision makers of data quality issues. Our process includes workflows to route potential issues to key stakeholders to avoid potential challenges.
Clients with an effective data quality program leverage software to implement hundreds of rules across multiple systems. The results of these rules are tracked by our managed EZGov service via dashboards. Data stewards are alerted when a data quality risk is identified, impacts are assessed, and solutions are devised and implemented.
In Conclusion…
Data Governance is crucial to the success of any organization, but implementing it effectively can be fraught with difficulties. These include time consumption, lack of executive support, and a struggle to balance bureaucracy with innovation.
Nexus Cognitive EZ Governance is a powerful, outsourced, and modern solution to handle your data governance needs. Manage your data assets effectively, efficiently, and ethically without getting bogged down in procedural complexities. Get Started Today