Inside Wolters Kluwer’s journey to data intelligence

CT Corporation has a ton of data, but has struggled to derive information and insights needed to get closer to customers by addressing their needs and understanding how they wish to interact. While this is becoming a problem many companies are beginning to face, CT Corporation was ready to solve it. Lieto had brought up data governance in the past, but the company wasn’t ready, or the tools weren’t up to the job at that point. Now, with digital transformation as a company-wide objective, they were ready. One of the issues with the other data governance/metadata management tools that were tested is that CT Corporation would have to host and maintain and support these tools, which costs way too much. With one of the technology goals of the digital transformation being a move to cloud based services, Lieto was able to see the opportunity to implement Collibra. Collibra’s cloud and business driven model was precisely the right tool to help the organization achieve data intelligence.

The number one piece of advice Lieto has for data citizens seeking to lead their company on a path to data intelligence is to “be in line with your stakeholders.” If you’re not, it’s unlikely you’ll succeed in your role. So how does he suggest getting buy-in from stakeholders? “Do good work and have a good reputation; from there, you can make your case because stakeholders will listen to you.”

Lieto said the goal of their implementation process was to get the business glossary up and running first. “Luckily our Data Management team has been in place for over two years, all members long tenured with deep system and data knowledge so building the first version of this asset came easily,” Lieto said. “The goal is to give business users some breadcrumbs to get them into the system and using it regularly. Then we can expand our implementation from there.”

The next thing Lieto had on his to-do list was to form a Data Governance Council and Charter. This council comprised of cross functional business and technical leaders across the organization is to meet and make decisions together taking a democratized, non-invasive approach to data governance. For example, if marketing is trying to send out a campaign to mid-sized companies and there is a misinterpretation of how this customer set is tagged, the campaign won’t be as successful as it could be. “This practice will drive our data maturity to the next level.”

According to Lieto, a successful outcome for the Data Track of the digital transformation is to create an enterprise data layer that is comprised of data assets that are defined and mapped to source systems and leverage APIs for read/write operations. This will enable the organization to retire/replace systems and add new data sources with minimal rewrite and rework. For Collibra specifically, success means socialization. It is having data assets understood and seeing it in motion. “For example,” Lieto said, “knowing exactly what reports are five stars or two stars; what the data sources are and the lineage of the data will be a difference maker for our sales and service operations.”