Data Governance Services and Consultancy

Ensure data across all your systems is trusted, accessible and understood.

Better Care for Your Data

Data is your most valuable asset. But, if you don’t have the right systems and processes in place, your data can fail to provide the real-time insights you need to seize opportunities and avoid risks.

Adastra Data Governance provides a single source of truth for all your decision-making while maintaining information compliancy, security, and accuracy. Our Gartner-recognized services will align your data and business strategies so you can extract insights that will help you achieve your organization’s goals.

For over 20 years, Adastra has refined our methodologies for designing and building data governance frameworks, solutions, and processes. We have delivered over 500 data governance and data management projects and assisted clients to improve the quality of trillions of data records.

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Trusted by

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I highly appreciate the quality of work provided by Adastra consultants and would recommend them to executives and companies willing to increase their Data Governance maturity.

Martin Novak
Head of BI, Allwyn

Why Adopt Adastra’s Data Governance Framework?

Analyze data faster and gain insights you can implement quickly with minimal disruption to your business.

Ensure that critical data assets are actionable, deliver insights and maintain accountability through standardized, enterprise-wide ways of working.

Secure your private/sensitive data and ensure compliance with digital subjects’ rights and regulations through data classification.

Build a single version of truth to ensure that all data consumers use the right data from an authoritative source to support decision making.

Gain a 360-degree view of customer, supplier, and other relationships to optimize sales motions and marketing campaigns.

Reduce repetitive pain points and manual work in report and analytics preparation.

Extract return on investment (ROI) from analytic and artificial intelligence (AI) by driving uptake.

Bridge business and IT efforts in major systems migration and modernization projects.

Define data to improve how your organization uses data for decision making.

Build a common language for improved collaboration.

Ensure data is trusted and fit for purpose by automating data quality management.

Experience faster ramp-ups and time-to-market for new business.

Improve operational efficiency and cross-department collaboration.

Explore Our Governance Services

Data Governance Program Design and Implementation

Adastra provides a wide range of services that support global enterprises around the world on their data governance journey. These services encompass data governance assessments and regulatory compliance reviews which ensure that organizations adhere to industry standards and regulations. Adastra also has expertise in data governance framework/program design and roadmap development; we develop custom strategies for every organization.

Adastra also helps organizations select and execute the best data governance solutions through data governance tool/platform assessments, selection support, and implementation. Adastra’s data governance operations support and data office as a service solutions ensure continual support and optimization for data governance success.

Data Quality Management

By leveraging Adastra’s data quality management expertise, you can continuously monitor your data and dynamically improve its quality using automated cleansing platforms to provide end users with usable, quality data. By deploying data quality management tools to your cloud analytics platform, you will also build trust in reporting and analytics products by delivering the accurate, consistent insights needed to inform your decisions.

Master Data Management (MDM)

Master data describes the most important entities that make up your organization’s business processes and operations. Master data management (MDM) is concerned with the deduplication and consolidation of data from multiple source systems for a single version of the truth or “golden record” to drive your reporting and analytics. MDM enables a 360-degree view of key relationships like customer and supplier, enabling optimization of customer journeys, relationship management, and customer lifetime value management.

Metadata Management

Metadata, or definitions and specifications about your data, is the fuel of data governance. A centralized data catalog tool drives data literacy and usage by providing users with a single view of your entire data estate. Moreover, through data classification, metadata management enables data to have compliance controls. These include identification of sensitive data, flagging and management of personal data subject to legislation such as GDPR, and recording of access/usage entitlements. Metadata management processes and tools are foundational skills required for data quality management and master data management.

Reference Data Management (RDM)

A subset of master data management, reference data management (RDM) platforms and processes allow you to centrally author standardized reference data like codes and hierarchies to disseminate them across your organization’s applications. RDM is critical to ensuring synchronized, comparable analytics data from multiple source systems.

Data Governance Training & Data Literacy

Elevate your team’s proficiency in data governance with our tailored Data Governance Training Program.  The program is meticulously crafted to equip your team with the essential skills needed to manage and safeguard your data effectively. From foundational data governance principles to the complexities of strategy development and implementation, we’ve got it covered. Participants will receive comprehensive training materials and guidelines, with specific content tailored to your organization’s requirements.

Rely on Trusted and Useable Data

Data governance provides the necessary people and processes with a framework for organizing and cleansing data to gain insights for informed decision-making.

Adastra’s Approach to Data Governance

Adastra’s approach to data governance design and deployment is guided by a design principle we refer to as “Just Enough Governance”. This “North Star” that directs Adastra’s approach is geared at developing solutions that attain the sweet spot between:

Overhead

Minimum governance overhead to the level truly required to accomplish clearly defined goals.

Resourcing

Adequate resourcing, funding, organizational alignment, and readiness to ensure a sustainable organizational capacity to achieve data management goals over time.
Business people discussing the AWS Migration Acceleration Program benefits.

To find the right amount of governance suitable for your organization, Adastra remains focused on identifying organizational use cases and defining how the solution will address organization challenges. Our experience demonstrates that a clear, well-defined value proposition can help executive stakeholders and other decision makers understand, master, and sustain efforts and funding.

Adastra is deeply committed to participatory, inclusive co-design and tailoring of prescriptive solutions. We have learned that rightsizing design solutions and developing plans with key client stakeholders delivers superior adoption to sequential consultant-designed/subsequently socialized approaches.

Data Governance Framework Design

The starting point for tailoring and rightsizing a Data Governance Program Framework is to understand the existing data management landscape through the lens of Adastra’s 4P Framework (Processes, People, Platform and Policies) and the 11 knowledge areas of the DAMA Wheel.

Adastra's 4P Data Governance framework.
Adastra's 4P DG Framework
DAMA Wheel and Adastra's Data Governance framework.
DAMA Wheel

By identifying an organization’s data governance use cases and key data management pain points, Adastra then proceeds with the creation of a Data Governance Framework. This involves adopting a holistic, incremental approach conceived strategically to ensure adequate coverage of the organization’s data management needs and implemented tactically for strong value realization and sustainment.

Data Governance Deployment and Operationalization

Once data governance design is complete, Adastra helps clients mobilize their DG function according to a defined roadmap. Mobilization steps typically include:

1

Filling DG office roles and assigning accountability for different data sets (by domain, system, process, or business unit) to data stewards/owners.

2

Creating DG operationalization artifacts, such as policies, processes, and onboarding materials.

3

Data governance platform and tooling deployment.
The Data Management Lifecycle & DG Operationalization Pilot Projects

With roles filled and the capability to make decisions about data in place, Adastra then guide the newly mobilized DG function through pilot projects (PoCs or MVPs) aimed at allowing the DG office and data stewards to execute DG processes, and thereby to learn by doing under the guidance of Adastra consultants.

Pilot projects will involve executing aspects of the data management lifecycle as illustrated.

At the end of the DG deployment phase, your organization will have gained all the necessary tools, ways of working, and organizational knowledge required to continue rolling out DG techniques to your entire data estate.

BEST S.A. on Collaborating with Adastra

In this video, Natalia Wasielewska, Director of Data Quality Management at BEST S.A., shares her experience working with Adastra on a recent data governance project.

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Success Story

Harnessing the Data Landscape at Allwyn

Allwyn faced challenges in managing its complex data landscape, experiencing frequent issues with poor data quality, reporting, missing data policies and data governance roles. As a result, Allwyn was spending a lot of time understanding their data instead of using it to achieve their business goals.

I highly appreciate the quality of work provided by Adastra consultants and would recommend them to executives and companies willing to increase their Data Governance maturity.

Martin Novak | Head of BI, Allwyn

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Success Story

Data Governance Transformation Initiative in Avast

Avast was on the verge of transforming Data Governance, by enhancing the scope of team, establishing processes to improve current partial control over personal data, advocating related policies and implementing Ataccama ONE software as the repository of single truth.

Adastra helped Avast to establish an automated and connected single repository for instant access to applications, systems and its components as a single point of truth. This included business analysis and technical implementation for data catalogue, product catalogue (RDM), Client Master (MDM), as well as defining all the needed processes, design of the org. structure, roles and responsibilities and enforcement of the policies in respect to the GDPR.

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Success Story

Data Governance for Financial Data Centricity and Business Innovation

Our client was embarking on their transformation to a data centric organization for M&A purposes. To deliver product-level profitability reporting, Apotex required a full overhaul of financial reporting date with applications for metadata management, data quality management, master data management on a cloud data platform. The goal was to unite company data, processes, methodologies, ownership and stewardship.

Adastra defined a DG target operating model with a focus and built organizational alignment to go live via pilot projects. We stood up competencies for ownership, stewardship, architecture, integration, metadata, data quality and master/reference data management, reporting governance, and BI/analytics.

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Success Story

Data Governance Program Design for Access Management

Adastra designed, built, and implemented a data governance (DG) framework for a provincial self-regulatory organization aimed at ensuring its data estate is controlled and secured against data breaches. The project spanned DG Framework design, roadmap creation, and deployment activities.

Adastra’s data governance solution included DG Framework design, creation of policies and processes, stand up of Informatica Data Catalog and Data Quality tool, and classification of our client’s data estate. The project resulted in CPA Ontario’s Data Governance Program being defined, approved, and deployed.

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Featured Resources

Data Governance FAQ

What is data governance?

Data governance is a data management concept that addresses the risk versus value of your organization’s data—from ingestion to analysis. It is policy-driven to help you manage regulatory compliance, data quality, and access. Good data governance means getting the right data to the right people at the right time so everyone can drive faster insights.

Data governance allows you to set up systems of accountability for the information that individuals and teams use. It ensures your organization’s data is accurate, trusted, shareable and usable for decision-making purposes.

Drive Individual Accountability

Building accountability starts with defining your organization’s roles and responsibilities. Then, you can create data stewardship processes to ensure teams input, maintain and transfer data properly. These steps will allow teams to trust the data they use for analytics and forecasting.

Succeed with Digital Transformation

Data Governance lays the foundation for a successful digital transformation initiative. With a tailored governance program in place, you will better understand your business landscape—including your architecture, systems, resources and culture—so you can reap the full benefits of any new technologies you implement.

Improve Compliance with Data Controls

Without proper controls, you risk entering incorrect data into your systems. This inaccurate data can lead to unnecessary losses and penalties. Controls improve your risk management processes so you can fulfill all regulatory requirements around data privacy and security.

Interpret Data Accurately

Our teams can’t communicate effectively when data definitions are unclear, inconsistent, or missing. Data Governance provides a single version of the truth so teams can trust the data in all your systems and avoid issues that stem from misinterpretation.

Increase BI and Analytics Efficiencies

If you lack effective governance, you’ll encounter inefficiencies during reporting and reconciliation. Schema management, accessible information and data integrity minimize inefficiencies and the time it takes to prepare data—allowing your data scientists to focus on intelligent insights and effective BI.

  • 20+ years of data integration experience.
  • Custom solutions to meet your needs.
  • Highly qualified data management experts to help you achieve your goals.
  • A world-leading data management and AI platform.
  • Gartner-recognized Data Governance services.
  • Proven track record of helping enterprises solve their data management challenges.

Get Started

Discover how Adastra can maximize the value of your data. Book a FREE 30-minute consultation with a data governance expert now.