How Delta Community Credit Union Enhanced Its Data Governance with OvalEdge

CLIENT’S PROFILE

Delta Community Credit Union (DCCU) serves individuals and businesses with a range of financial services, including savings accounts, loans, mortgages, and investment options. Operating primarily in the southeastern U.S., it emphasizes member-focused services and financial education. The organization seeks to provide accessible, community-oriented banking with a focus on competitive rates and personalized support.

CONTEXT

As DCCU began to enhance its business intelligence (BI) capabilities, it quickly became clear that the organization needed to take a structured approach to data management. A core goal was to establish a reliable, single source of truth for its data, ensuring consistency and trust across all business units. 

A critical aspect of this effort was defining key data constructs. For example, DCCU established a common and consistent definition for the term "member," which enabled reliable measurement of key performance indicators (KPIs) such as "member growth" and "member attrition."

These foundational data governance efforts were spearheaded by a coalition of cross-functional business stakeholders—each providing different talents, outlooks, and objectives—marking the beginning of an accountability framework within DCCU's governance model. By assigning ownership and stewardship responsibilities to business stakeholders, the program gained traction, resulting in significant user engagement and increased trust in the organization's data warehouse.

As DCCU's governance program grew, the organization realized it needed to implement additional data governance tools and technologies to support scaling, automation, and the formalization of governance roles.

WHY OVALEDGE

DCCU collaborated with OvalEdge to enhance its data governance strategy. The organization selected OvalEdge for its comprehensive and simple approach to implementing data governance across the organization. 

“OvalEdge has a comprehensive yet simple solution focusing on the three most crucial data governance programs: data access and literacy management, enhancing access and administrative governance of our analytics systems, and  data quality improvement,” said a DCCU spokesperson. 

SOLUTION

The OvalEdge business glossary has played a crucial role in helping users at DCCU better understand their data, its sources, and how metrics are calculated. Before implementing OvalEdge, users relied on inefficient, spreadsheet-based processes and often emailed data dictionaries back and forth, leading to delays and confusion.

OvalEdge has streamlined this process by organizing, classifying, and categorizing data, allowing users to access and interpret information independently and with greater clarity. The OvalEdge business glossary empowered users to trace data lineage, visualize the origin of data, and understand how metrics are calculated.

Lineage played a crucial role in tracking data, specifically its origins and destinations. DCCU utilized Microstrategy and Teradata, while OvalEdge auto lineage was employed to map the entire data flow. 

Additionally, OvalEdge improved DCCU’s data stewardship by facilitating the crowdsourcing of stewardship responsibilities within the organization. The platform allowed DCCU to involve business users as stewards who could curate content, define data terms, and ensure data was consistently managed and classified. 

Finally, the OvalEdge data catalog facilitated tagging and data categorization, tracked rules applied during data transformations, and provided insight into how metrics were structured and calculated.

As DCCU continues to mature, the organization plans to leverage more capabilities in OvalEdge, including implementing the data quality scorecard feature, enforcing least privilege security for NPI/PII data across the enterprise, and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations.

OUTCOMES

The implementation of OvalEdge has resulted in significant improvements to DCCU's data governance processes. The business glossary now allows users to comprehend data terms and trace the lineage of metrics. This capability enables them to understand the origin and transformation of data, such as loan portfolios from various systems. Self-service capabilities have significantly reduced the time and effort required to gather data while also enhancing collaboration across locations. 

Another major benefit for DCCU was the engagement of employees in developing the data stewardship model. By crowdsourcing data definitions for the business glossary, DCCU fostered a common understanding and consistent use of terms across functions. Glossary terms, curated by subject matter experts, made it easier for everyone in the organization to comprehend the meaning and context of the data.

From a data quality perspective, DCCU was able to proactively identify issues and alert the relevant data stewards, allowing them to take ownership and address problems. This proactive approach to data quality management was crucial, as it fed into DCCU's advanced analytics models.