Accelerating Information Governance and Providing Self-service with Atlan

The Lively Metadata Pioneers collection options Atlan prospects who’ve lately accomplished a radical analysis of the Lively Metadata Administration market. Paying ahead what you’ve discovered to the subsequent information chief is the true spirit of the Atlan neighborhood! In order that they’re right here to share their hard-earned perspective on an evolving market, what makes up their fashionable information stack, progressive use instances for metadata, and extra.

On this installment of the collection, we meet Gabrielle Tyll, Senior Vice President, Director of Enterprise Initiatives at SouthState Financial institution, a tenured worker of the financial institution who shares their two-year journey towards constructing a contemporary information stack and performance, their objectives for Information Governance, and why they selected Atlan as a way of driving information possession and self-service.

This interview has been edited for brevity and readability.

Might you inform us a bit about your self, your background, and what drew you to Information & Analytics?

I began my profession with SouthState a little bit over 16 years in the past and I’ve held a wide range of roles throughout totally different areas of the Financial institution, together with the Shopper Financial institution, Operations, Danger Administration and Program Administration. A number of years in the past, I used to be offered the chance to develop and implement a knowledge governance program for the Financial institution. As somebody who’s an issue solver and loves a superb problem, I excitedly set to work. Quick ahead to the current day, the Financial institution has an enterprise information program we discuss with as our Information Intelligence Program, powered by a hybrid staff and a contemporary information expertise stack.

Would you thoughts describing SouthState Financial institution, and the way your information staff helps the group?

SouthState has about $44 billion in belongings, 250+ places, and offers shopper, business, mortgage and wealth administration options to multiple million prospects all through Florida, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. SouthState additionally serves shoppers coast to coast by its correspondent banking division.

As you possibly can think about, with the quantity of shoppers and breadth of economic providers offered by the Financial institution, comes a wide range of information wants throughout the Financial institution. The purpose of the Information Intelligence Program is to create a centralized place that simplifies and streamlines our staff members’ interplay with information. We discovered information was not at all times simply accessible and posed challenges when somebody wanted to mixture varied information sources to supply an final result. We knew getting our crucial information sources centralized and aggregated throughout the Information Intelligence surroundings would enable staff members to focus extra on offering exceptional experiences for our prospects and different staff members, and fewer time on joins and merges. 

Over the previous two years, we’ve continued to onboard strains of enterprise into the Information Intelligence surroundings, and our hope is that someday we could have reached self-service capabilities, the place staff members can simply search and retrieve the info they want impartial of our staff. 

Might you describe your information stack, and the way it got here collectively?

On the onset of the Information Intelligence Program, we knew we needed to put money into a knowledge expertise stack that was not solely sustainable at our present measurement, however scalable for future progress. Pace to market was one other driving power, and we deliberately chosen a stack that might get rid of inefficiencies for our information engineers. 

Primarily based on our wants, we evaluated and finally adopted a cloud-based information stack which hit the mark on our wants and past. Fashionable stacks sometimes function on a consumption-based pricing mannequin, so storage and different prohibitive prices related to it have been now not a difficulty. We may pay for what we used, and our expertise would develop with us. One other good thing about our stack is that it’s front-end agnostic, so we are able to adapt to the wants of our enterprise and help no matter BI device they select to make use of.

What prompted your seek for an Lively Metadata Administration platform? What have been you making an attempt to resolve?

We knew with the intention to reach operationalizing information governance, we would have liked to have a platform that not solely offered our staff with centralized insights into our information surroundings, but in addition a user-friendly device that helps the actions of our information house owners and information stewards. Considering ahead on our journey to self-service, we additionally wished to discover a platform that might allow a unified understanding of knowledge and simply join staff members throughout the Financial institution with the trusted information they want. 

Why was Atlan a superb match? Did something stand out throughout your analysis course of?

Beginning an analysis of any platform, vendor or device could be overwhelming, as there are such a lot of choices on the market. For our staff, partnership was high of thoughts. We wanted to discover a companion prepared to embark on this journey with us, not simply promote us a device. The Atlan staff we labored with throughout our analysis actually went above and past to make sure we had all the data wanted to make an knowledgeable determination. They have been very aware of our questions, and so they have been capable of successfully exhibit their platform.

From a technical perspective, there have been lots of options already in place or quickly to come back that made Atlan stand out from others being evaluated. They built-in with our total stack by native connectors, which makes preliminary configuration and ongoing administration a lot easier. Bi-directional tagging was additionally a singular function we didn’t see in different choices. The influence evaluation function was additionally a significant profit, notably for our information engineers. 

Atlan’s interface was very straightforward to navigate and has proved to be very intuitive even from an administration perspective. The user-friendly interface coupled with the expertise of Atlan Anyplace will definitely assist our staff drive consumer adoption over time.

What do you plan on creating with Atlan? Do you’ve got an concept of what use instances you’ll construct, and the worth you’ll drive?

Since partnering with Atlan, there have already been fairly a number of use instances come up that we look ahead to kicking off. Getting our information engineers utilizing Atlan is one in every of our preliminary areas of focus, as they’re residing on this area every day, and the advantages of Atlan may actually assist them be more practical of their roles. We additionally intend to leverage Atlan to assist set up and handle the wanted governance elements for our Information Communities from glossaries and classifications to CDE identification and lineage. 

Shortly after partnering with Atlan, our staff found a line of enterprise was actively looking for a knowledge catalog for one in every of our SaaS functions, and due to Atlan’s fashionable strategy, we have been capable of simply set up a connector and stop the onboarding of a device that might finally lead to an information silo. This particular use case is one in every of many examples of the worth our staff hopes to drive with Atlan – breaking down information silos and making a neighborhood for our staff members to have interaction with each other about information and selling confidence and belief within the information they use. 

Did we miss something?

For anybody tasked with information governance, having a device that’s straightforward to make use of and might get individuals onboard, if not excited, about their position in help of knowledge governance is certainly a win. And to this point for us, Atlan is proving to be a device that may just do that and extra!  

Picture by Robert Bye on Unsplash