BCS Financial Group successfully implemented the Arenadata Catalog business glossary

2024: Implementation of Arenadata Catalog

On January 16, 2024, Arenadata announced that the BCS Financial Group, together with the IBS group of companies, had implemented a project to implement the Arenadata Catalog data catalog. The move helped BCS reach the next level of digital maturity and cut data search and delivery times by more than five times.

As reported, against the background of a significant growth in the client base, FG BCS in early 2023 had a need to optimize the availability of data for various business processes. For the company, the systematization of the accumulated data and its effective use to increase profits became especially important.

We understood that we faced an ambitious task - the transformation of data work. At the same time, the market has already accumulated some expertise and practices, many of which can be applied. explained Arthur Averyanikhin, BCS Financial Group CDO

Developing a data transformation strategy, the BCS CDO office team was primarily guided by internal client metrics: data search and delivery time; Simple role model and access processes consistency of data with each other.

BCS specialists intended to achieve these goals both by replacing the technology stack of existing solutions, and through the creation of others, for example, a data catalog and a business glossary. The developed strategy was based on a preliminary study, with the help of which internal useful practices were discovered. Thus, it is more likely to talk not about transformation as such, but about the evolution of working with data.

BCS studied the products on the market and, as a result of competitive selection, settled on the Arenadata Catalog business glossary. The decisive role was played by his maturity, the number of large customers and a clear development map for the coming years. At the same time, a number of requirements were imposed on the data catalog. It was supposed to physically reflect the data model that is used in BCS information systems. It was necessary to implement the ability to search for data assets (including with filtering by parameters), view them, edit the description, visualize Data lineage, and also assign those responsible for data assets.

The Arenadata Catalog implementation project clearly demonstrates how companies need a business glossary as the volume and complexity of accumulated data grows. The implementation of Arenadata Catalog helps to solve many difficulties along the way and becomes the first stage in building effective Data Governance processes and optimizing work with data warehouses. commented Ivan Novoselov, CEO of DataCatalog (part of the Arenadata group), developer of the Arenadata Catalog business glossary

For IBS, this project has become one of the key systems of this class. The product of the Russian vendor Arenadata - Arenadata Catalog was chosen as the software solution for the data catalog. The IBS team deployed the data catalog and integrated it with the BCS information systems. In addition to building a technological architecture, we have developed a methodology and all the necessary documentation for working with the catalog. BCS employees are already starting to use it. The company has identified those responsible who will monitor the relevance of the data. It is expected that this project will allow BCS to reduce the time spent on creating reports and analytics, as well as optimize the transparency of the data used by the company. comments Mikhail Roshchin, Deputy Director of IBS Project Management and Architecture

In FG BCS, the Arenadata Catalog business glossary has integration with analytical storage, which is itself built on a heterogeneous basis. It provides synergy in the interaction of commands working with data, due to the fact that the data model, its description, markup, ownership, etc., are in one tool. At the same time, the tool allows the company to fulfill an important goal: to correctly prioritize the connection of systems and describe indicators in order to avoid storing redundant and unclaimed information.

As of January 2024, the Arenadata Catalog implementation project has been put into pilot operation. It became part of the BCS IT evolution program, designed for the next three years and designed to implement more than 170 requests from the company's business units to improve the processes of each of them. Already, the CDO office receives complementary feedback from business units to the product, and the time for searching and delivering data has been reduced by more than five times.

For January 2024, we are in the process of filling out the data catalog, but the roles of the people who work with it have already been described. This will allow us to optimize the audit of storage primarily from the point of view of working with critical data. Previously, this was done by hand, and, as you know, the factor of human error is expensive. told Arthur Averyanikhin, CDO of BCS financial group

In the near future, the BCS team is going to connect additional data sources to Arenadata Catalog, including ClickHouse, Kafka and Airflow. The Arenadata Catalog business glossary implementation project is one of the stages of a large BCS project to optimize data management efficiency, in which a number of Arenadata products are being piloted as of January 2024.