Creating a Data Governance Office

ORGANIZATION

XTIVIA’s client is a Global Car Rental Company operating over 15,900 corporate and franchise locations across 145 countries on six continents. Over the past five years, the corporation has offered 5,000,000 vehicles to millions of customers. With a presence at every major airport worldwide, the company employs approximately 37,000 individuals and reports billions in annual revenue. In addition to car rental services, the company owns a vehicle leasing and fleet management business.

CHALLENGE

As part of a significant transformation initiative, our client needed to define a consistent future state to serve as the foundation for the requirements of technology teams implementing future state systems. However, the client lacked a functional working group or decision-making body to define this future state.

This challenge was further complicated by the organization’s global footprint, where identical business terms were interpreted differently across regions, and different terms were used to represent the same concept. These inconsistencies in data interpretation and usage, coupled with multiple versions and copies of data, resulted in poor data quality across the enterprise.

The inconsistent use and interpretation of data, combined with poor data quality, also posed significant legal and financial compliance risks, including challenges related to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance.
To address these issues, the client required a Governance Organization to establish a standardized business glossary across the enterprise. This organization would also define and enforce processes and procedures to resolve inconsistencies in data, business rules, and data quality issues effectively.

“As part of a significant technology transformation initiative, we needed a technology partner that had deep expertise and the capacity to understand our situation as well as the ability to implement the solution. XTIVIA was that partner. As a result, we integrated hundreds of mission-critical applications in a short time frame.” – Global VP of Architecture

SOLUTION

XTIVIA evangelized the significance of Data Governance and helped establish a Data Governance Office (DGO) comprising:

• Executive Sponsor
• Data Governance Council of Global Business Leaders – mostly Senior Vice Presidents from different lines of business
• Multiple Working Steering Committees – mostly Subject Matter Experts in each domain
• Data Owners and Data Stewards
• Data Quality Center of Excellence

Additionally, XTIVIA:

• Established Data Governance (DG) processes and change control procedures.
• Designed the necessary artifacts for data gates and implemented gate reviews.
• Established a baseline for data management maturity (current state).
• Set a cadence to measure data management maturity every six months.
• Created a Data Governance KPI Dashboard to measure:
  • The maturity model,
  • Data standards,
  • Data quality,
  • Data program projects
• Documented and communicated the Global Business Glossary of Terms, identifying primary data sources for creating and analyzing business terms and establishing a repository for the glossary.
• Created Data Policies, standards related to those policies, system processes to implement them, and metrics to monitor policy enforcement.
• Established a Data Classification system, applied by data owners to guide persistence, transmission, and retention policies for their data.
• Developed Data Models for critical legacy systems, including:
  • Identification of impacted system data models,
  • Reverse engineering of systems slated for decommissioning,
  • Create critical data elements (CDE) data dictionaries.

Using XTIVIA’s DG Services, Accelerators, Methodology, and Artifacts, the client was able to accelerate DG requirements and implementation to complete the project within the budget and time allocated.

BUSINESS RESULT

• The customer established an empowered Data Governance Organization (DGO) and processes to resolve data and business process inconsistencies across the enterprise.
• Steering committees eliminated inconsistencies in business terms, processes, and future state requirements, resulting in significant time savings (measured in person-years) during the implementation of future state systems and globally standardized business processes.
• Reduced compliance risks by millions of dollars across the enterprise.
• Improved go-live data quality and implemented an organization and processes to ensure continuous improvement in data quality.

KEYWORDS

Data Governance, DG, DGO, Corporate Governance, IT Governance, Methodology, GDPR, Data Classification, Compliance, Risk, Data Quality, Steering committee, Data Models, Policies, Information Protection, Framework, Data Management, Data Governance Council, Data Stewards

SOFTWARE

Data Management, Data Models

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