Success story Town hall in Spain

Public Administration

Identified needs

Like most organisations, the council operates with isolated departments where the information handled by each department is not shared freely, and they end up becoming islands of information that are only used by the department in question, leading to the proliferation of uncontrolled data exchange and the establishment of alternative ways of sharing information.

Furthermore, in the council in question, all responsibility falls on the IT department, which lacks functional knowledge of the data and therefore knowledge of how to organise and democratise it across the entire administration.

The main problems facing the council are:

  • Lack of culture in data management and access management.
  • Problems identifying the source of erroneous data.
  • Access to data managed by IT without a defined data request procedure.
  • Existence of a large number of decentralised and heterogeneous data repositories.

Use case

The implemented use case provides the council with a genuine Data Marketplace that encompasses and centralises the previously isolated vision of all departments. To achieve this, the following actions were taken:

  •  Compilation of different sources of information and their origins. The tools are capable of connecting and transforming the scattered and disaggregated vision of the departments into a central model that meets the different information consumption needs of the council's users.
  •  Location of sensitive information, demonstrating the semantic and advanced search capabilities of Anjana Data's Data Marketplace. Ability to tag data structures, which in turn triggers the execution of policies that enable data standardisation.
  •    Declaration of the lineage of data sources, from their creation to their consumption by council users.
  •  Demonstration of what it means to build an end-to-end Data Marketplace, covering the exposure of data through DSAs (Data Sharing Agreements), and continuing with the process of searching for and purchasing data through the shopping cart. All this to finally sign contracts and obtain access to them, without the need to resort to third-party systems.
  •  Adapt Anjana Data to the current vision that council users have of their systems, making it a user-friendly platform that is familiar to the users in question.

Objectives set

The use case selected and developed at Anjana Data aims to provide the council with a platform that allows it to:

  • Self-management in requesting access to data in a manner governed by council users.
  • The elimination of bottlenecks caused by excessive workload in the IT department. All this with the aim of giving business users greater control over information.
  •  The incorporation of a Data Marketplace as the best way to establish autonomous access management governed by all users.
  •  Simplification of technological complexity, as it currently has a complex technology stack, which means that different technologies have to coexist, complicating its management and making it very difficult for a single person to understand the data flows and end-to-end processes, requiring varied expertise in several technologies.

Functional and technical architecture

 

Benefits obtained

Once the use case has been completed and after a brief period of operation, the following benefits can be observed:

  •  Have a governed Data Marketplace with self-managed access, thanks to the combined capabilities of Anjana Data and Denodo. There is no longer any need to talk to IT, as users themselves self-manage their data needs.
  • Have a single view of all the data present and displayed in the council in an orderly manner for consumption. Denodo provides a single view of all data repositories, but at the same time, by displaying it in Anjana's Data Marketplace, it is no longer necessary to enter Denodo to search for data. Instead, with a business perspective, Anjana Data provides a single window where any council role can search for any data using their own language.
  •  Bringing council data closer to all types of profiles, not just technical or IT profiles. Not everyone has access to all the council's databases to know what is stored there. However, with a central catalogue, all users can access the information in a much more accessible and less technical way.
  •  Have automated workflows for any type of asset within the Data Marketplace. Everything that happens in the Data Marketplace occurs in an orderly and governed manner. In other words, we are able to build flows that map onto the procedures that the council currently has in place, or onto the new procedures generated by the initiative.
  •  Being able to incorporate an agnostic semantic layer into technical assets (business terminology, metrics, KPIs, etc.) that helps business users find what they need.

Challenges overcome

The challenges overcome have been both technological and functional. Below are some of the most notable ones:

  • Creation of a common environment for coordinated deployment of Anjana Data and Denodo on an existing architecture with high technological complexity.
  • Parts have been developed for this purpose to fully meet the requirements set out in the use case.
  • Lack of maturity in the Data Governance of the city council, breaking down the barriers of what it means to have a semantic layer over technical assets and demonstrating the value this brings in the execution of scenarios.