DATA | CASE STUDY

Establish a Collaborative Data Governance Strategy

COMPANY OVERVIEW

A medical professional liability insurance company with clients and services spanning the U.S. that specializes in underwriting policies for physicians, dentists, advanced practices, clinics, and hospitals.

BUSINESS NEED

The client recognized a need for Advanced Analytics and Business Intelligence capabilities to create an information edge over the competition. In order to enable these analytics teams to develop as quickly and efficiently as possible, the client sought to enhance their existing data governance process. This process would ensure that analytic data would be trustworthy, consistent, and accurate, which would allow the analytics teams to focus all of their energy on problem solving, not data cleansing.

SOLUTION

Ironside identified the aforementioned opportunities in a previous technology strategy engagement as being foundational prerequisites for the company to realize its analytics goals. Ironside recommended the formation of an enterprise data governance group. The group would consist of all claims data constituents from multiple subsidiaries and would be able to discuss the state of the data quality and implement improvements. The engagement was made up of the following phases:

Identify Who Will Govern

Identified key data domain constituents
Appointed a representative from each department to the Governance team
Appointed a data steward to monitor the data

Identify What to Govern

Conducted workshops with all representatives
Identified and recorded critical business data fields and their downstream usage

Teach How to Govern

Assigned a repeatable process to the data steward
Developed a standardized process for reporting, mitigating, and solving data issues
Coached the Governance team through a number of Governance meetings to rank data quality fields according to business value and effort

Establish Accountability

Business and IT partnered to establish responsibility and points of accountability
Executive Leadership made a commitment to hold the relevant parties responsible for data quality issues
Created dashboards and profiling processes to monitor the quality of governed data

KEYS TO SUCCESS

With Ironside’s help, the client enjoyed many benefits, which enabled them to:

Know changes to the data in advance and widely broadcast to the business
Have a clear point of contact, method for resolution, and timeline for solving data problems when one arises

Decrease the time Analysts spend verifying or questioning the validity of the data
Decrease the time to develop reports and analytics

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