Within the last few weeks we have sponsored two Data Governance conferences, including the recent Data Governance Financial Services conference in Jersey City. This was a great event with nearly 200 attendees from the financial services industry and over 25 sessions by thought leaders and practitioners, including one of our major customers: Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP).

OTTP’s case study was presented by Nancy Petersons, Director of Data Management. OTPP, like many financial services firms, relies on timely, accurate data for investment decisions, risk analysis, and regulatory compliance. The emphasis on data quality—along with the centralizing of shared data via their enterprise data warehouse, which uses TopBraid Enterprise Vocabulary Net for metadata management—created a number of challenges: demand for technologies and data quality services, an ambitious schedule for implementation, and a need for effective collaboration to define shared data sets.

Nancy described the approaches that OTPP used to successfully master these challenges. To date, data governance at OTPP has addressed substantive initiatives, including:

  • Metadata standards and population
  • Metrics and dashboards
  • Data steward training
  • Risk data classification and key data set identification
  • Regulatory reporting data sets
  • The more we attend these conferences, the more we see how much TopBraid EVN and TopBraid Reference Data Manager have to offer people working with data governance.