Bank Holding Company Selects Data360 for Business Process Optimization

Since its founding more than 200 years ago, Bank Holding Company (BHC) has grown into one of the world’s leading providers of financial services to institutional investors, including asset management, investment management, research and advisory services. Its activities include trust and custody, fund accounting, foreign exchange, shareholder services and a wide range of other administrative services for investment funds, pension plans, insurance companies, foundations, endowments and investment managers.

The Bank Holding Company’s commitment to ensuring a robust enterprise data governance included establishing an enterprise data governance management team, led by a CDO and supported by a team of data professionals, to provide methodology, tools, services and support for the initiative. This team vetted, selected and implemented IBM Infosphere Information Governance Catalog (IGC) as their technical governance tool of record, and relied on IBM resources to support much of their IT infrastructurewithin and among applications and systems as expected, the company can ensure the information is complete, accurate, consistent and reliable.

Business challenge

IBM IGC was an effective tool to catalog and manage technical assets, but the implementation team struggled to gain line of business teams’ adoption. Non-technical business users found the solution to be confusing and difficult to navigate, minimizing use and impeding efforts to grow the organization’s data governance maturity. It was quickly determined that a more flexible data platform to enhance the IBM IGC tool with user friendly capabilities for business process optimization was needed.

IBM IGC presented a number of challenges that the Bank Holding Company sought to solve, including:

• Lineage could only be derived from technical metadata, rather than glossary items, and the extreme granularity of lineage details were difficult to view and hard for business users to understand and manage.
• The user interface (UI) did not capture metrics for governance maturity or data quality.
• The UI lacked dashboards and visualizations beyond technical lineage. In addition, it had no search function, preventing users from searching for glossary entries such as data assets or business terms.
• There was no impact analysis for either glossary or technical assets to illustrate data relationships and flows.
• The tool had little flexibility, as restricted system (BI, database, files assets) configuration prevented users from personalizing screens or enriching data assets with additional fields for compliance or governance.
• Loading data into the system was a complicated, multi-step process that required technical expertise.
• There was limited ability to validate existing internal metadata against external metadata to identify discrepancies.

Read more about challenges faced by Bank Holding Company (BHC) as they implemented a highly technical enterprise data governance solution that was difficult to navigate and nearly impossible for non-technical users to update, preventing widespread adoption.