Client Challenge:
- Single source of truth- One of the biggest challenges was that there were many sources of data used by different teams across information security office. A single source of truth was needed for the bank as well as the auditors.
- Agreeing Business Rules across teams- We realized that there were multiple teams reporting on the same facts but had different understanding of the business rules. This caused a lot of discrepancies across the reports produced regularly, thereby causing confusion for the business users and the auditors.
- Data lineage and traceability- In larger size organizations one of the biggest challenges is to trace the golden source of data, we know that larger the organization more complex the data lineage and traceability gets due to the number of systems and teams.
- Report Automation- The clients had very elaborate and manually produced report for which weeks of man hours were needed monthly. The clients wanted full end to end automation of these manually produced reports and reporting packs to save on budget for repeated development and support tasks.
Our Solution and Approach:
- We identified the golden sources and design-develop one Datawarehouse holding historic data and business rules centrally for singular reference point for the whole of the bank entity. Well-designed ETL mappings using Informtica/BODS to pull data from the source, address data quality issues and apply transformation business logic to produce a refined data warehouse for the users to report on.
- We organized workshops with multiple and wider teams to agree on the business definitions and maintain a data dictionary on SharePoint for everyone to access. This was reviewed and maintained periodically by the central reporting and architecture team.
- We worked closely with the control owners to identify the golden sources and document the flow of data through various systems using data lineage tools.
- Automation of reporting is the most common challenge we encountered and to provide an end to end automated solution we automated the backend + ETL and the reporting various reporting and dashboarding tools like Business objects, Tableau, PowerBI etc.
Benefits we delivered to client
- Cost effective end to end automated Reporting solution for the client.
- Single source of truth within an organization helps supports effective decision support for the business users.
- Standard data integration framework pattern achieved which facilitates easy and effective maintenance of the warehouse.
Nandini Consulting Lessons Learnt
- Identifying key stakeholders is very crucial to any projects as majority of business knowledge sits with these key stakeholders and is usually not well documented in an organization.
- Key to manage heterogeneous data environment.