Digital Asset Repository

CASE STUDY

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Our Client

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Operating in over 60 countries this company is one of the world's largest publicly traded international oil and gas companies. This integrated oil and gas company discovers, explores for, develops and produces crude oil, natural gas and natural gas liquids.

The Challenge at Hand

For this business, D3Clarity was asked to create a data catalog of their data assets from the myriad of source systems (primarily in SAP) and translate technical database terms into business-friendly asset names and terms. This company had over 10 million assets to be cataloged and was overwhelmed by the work. Data assets for this customer were scattered across over ten different source systems. The initial client internal estimates to provide a comprehensive data catalog took over nine work months to complete, which equated to a cost of $1.6 million.

Innovative Solutions Unleashed

Through consulting, D3Clarity articulated the real business challenges facing this organization. Over the years, experience has shown that the best solutions come from asking better questions. In this case, the customer thought data assets had to be cataloged. In reality, D3Clarity discovered that 85% of the customer’s assets were essentially junk. In fact, only 15% (1.5 million) of the assets needed to be cataloged. Whenever cataloging a data asset, time, effort, and money are spent to do that work. Reducing what must be cataloged to the true elements leads to significant cost savings.

The next problem discovered through consulting with D3Clarity was that the customer was facing a lack of trust in the data when it was presented using analytics and visualization. In the past, this client was used to consuming data from PowerPoint presentations, which meant the presenter controlled the narrative. This style of communication proved to be dangerous as individuals lost trust in the narratives because there was never a correlation between the presentation language and the derived results.

Live analytics and visualizations force a powerful change to the narrative. It put the power of discovery in the hands of everyday people. This client bravely decided to change the approach around data from reporting to analytics. Still, unfortunately, the battle was not yet over as the mistrust of data from the past flowed into every analytics dashboard and visualization. How frustrating it is to convince each viewer that the data is sound constantly? What is the solution to this problem? The answer – Complete data transparency through total data lineage! D3Clarity provided a tool using graph database technology to show the data genealogy that assembled each data asset visually.

Transformative Results Achieved

D3Clarity provided a prototype that handled 70% of the client’s needs in 7 weeks. The system automatically cataloged over 90% of the critical assets (1.5 million of 10 million). This means that the system auto-cataloged 1,350,000 assets. Only 150,000 assets needed human intervention in some manner to be cataloged. Based on the client’s original assessment, they thought they needed 25 full-time equivalent people to handle the original cataloging of the entire asset set of 10 million assets. The prototype proved only one part-time person is needed to catalog the remaining 150,000 assets.

D3Clarity deployed a complete data lineage system that provided individual transparency to the client’s data assets. Now every user can see which data sets, queries, and aggregates are used to create analytic dashboards or visualizations. The data lineage system was an intangible benefit. No longer did the project team, project sponsors, or the digital transformation leadership need to answer the question of whether data was trustworthy.

In summary, this effort was projected to cost over $1.6 million and take over nine months if done in-house by the customer. D3Clarity provided an initial minimum viable product (MVP) covering over 70% of the requirements at $210K (a savings of over 86%) in 7 weeks (a time saving of over 80%).

DELIVERABLES	BUSINESS VALUE
Implementation of a data lineage system	Individual transparency to all of the data assets to create analytic dashboards or visualizations
Provided a MVP in 7 weeks using highly skilled resources	Cost and time savings

If you are interested in achieving results like this, please get in touch with us for an appointment. D3Clarity has nearly a century of experience to digitally transform your business to the next level.