Genworth Financial Accelerates Data Governance Initiatives with Catalog of Catalogs

Implementing a comprehensive enterprise-wide data governance and compliance strategy is a top priority for enterprises of all types and sizes, especially those in regulated industries.  Ask any data governance expert, compliance officer, or Chief Data Officer and they will tell you that it is a critical component of their data management strategy. Enterprises today recognize that governance is essential to derive value from their data and mitigate risks.

In a highly complex data landscape with petabyte-scale data residing across hundreds, if not thousands, of data sources across a multi-cloud and hybrid environment, that’s not an easy feat.

Building and operationalizing a robust and comprehensive data governance and compliance strategy, requires an integrated platform approach to data cataloging, enforcing data quality, privacy and governance policies and rules – powered by artificial intelligence and advanced automation to achieve scale.  It requires advanced APIs that can extract deep metadata and data lineage with granular information from some of the most complex and opaque data sources that permeate the enterprise data landscape.  At Informatica, we understand this journey all too well.

Recently, I had the opportunity to virtually meet with Christopher Corrigan, Data Governance Leader at Genworth Financial to discuss their data governance journey and use of Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog and Enterprise Data Catalog Advanced Scanners.  Following are some of the highlights from our discussion:

What are some of the business imperatives that led you towards  Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog and the Advanced Scanners ?

In a nutshell, “data literacy” was the overarching business driver behind our decision to use the Enterprise Data Catalog and the Advanced Metadata Scanners as part of our data governance program. We view intelligent data cataloging with deep and broad metadata connectivity as the foundational first step to enhancing data literacy. It was very important for our users to be able to rapidly and easily discover, certify and collaborate on data at scale.

Moreover, we needed end-to-end data lineage with detailed information to better understand the flow of data from source to destination, data relationships and dependencies as well as the transformations the data underwent throughout its lifecycle and across the data pipeline.  Data literacy was the foundation from which we could enable a variety of use cases, including democratization of data throughout the enterprise and data governance, which is a strategic initiative for us.

How are you using the Enterprise Data Catalog Advanced Scanners?

Like most organizations, we have a plethora of complex and proprietary data sources. For instance, we use various data analytics tools extensively. We needed a solution that would extract metadata and data lineage from those tools. It had to be able to handle metadata extraction that was both deep and detailed. For instance, we needed to extract SAS objects with complete business descriptions and gain detailed information and visibility into the data relationships and dependencies as well as the transformations the data underwent. With the Enterprise Data Catalog Advanced Scanners, we were able to obtain end-to-end visibility into our metadata from our data warehouse all the way up to the SAS modeling tool in record time.

What criteria did you use for choosing Informatica?

There were a couple of options we explored before settling on Enterprise Data Catalog Advanced Scanners. First, we considered the option of building scanners in-house for our data sources.  We very quickly realized that it was not a viable option.  The domain expertise and investment that Informatica has made in its Advanced Scanners leap-frogged us ahead by easily five to six years in terms of product capabilities.  Moreover, the cost-savings and time-to-market gains that came with using Enterprise Data Catalog Advanced Scanners far outweighed the option to build something in-house.  Additionally, the data lineage extraction delivered by Enterprise Data Catalog Advanced Scanners is extremely robust and powerful.  Lastly, we needed some custom capabilities that the Informatica team and Advanced Scanners were able to address. We also looked at other vendor scanners and set up POCs with a number of them. None of the other vendor scanners came close to the finish line in terms of metadata and data lineage extraction. 

We support many business units who rely heavily on SAS.  Enterprise Data Catalog and Advanced Scanners allow for an iterative process that doesn’t impact business operations.  They give us the flexibility to very quickly extract, understand and collaborate on data with our users and deliver quick wins before moving on to the next milestone. 

Lastly, we selected the Enterprise Data Catalog and Advanced Scanners because we are taking an integrated platform approach to data governance and data management.  Informatica is a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions over the last five years.

What are some of the benefits you’ve experienced since your implementation?

The biggest business value we’ve encountered in using Enterprise Data Catalog has been on the data discovery, data collaboration, and end-to-end data lineage front. We are on our way to building a 360-degree view of our data. Additionally, the Data Asset Analytics dashboard that comes with the Enterprise Data Catalog has been very beneficial in helping us optimize the value of our data assets and better manage our entire data transformation infrastructure. Overall, our investment in Enterprise Data Catalog coupled with Advanced Scanners have given us cost savings, productivity, and time-to-market gains.

To learn more about Enterprise Data Catalog and the Advanced Scanners, I invite you to watch “Leave No Metadata Behind: Lessons from Westpac Bank” webinar.  Additionally, I recommend watching the webinar – “Genworth Bolsters Risk Management and Data Governance with Informatica”. You may also wish to read the eBook, “Drive Your Business Forward with a Catalog of Catalogs.”