Canadian City Government

A Canadian city created a data-sharing hub for its city systems and governmental departments to achieve a single view of shared information and entities.

Business objective & project requirements

The city government aimed to implement an effective Master Data Management and Data Governance solution and overcome data challenges including duplication and ineffective sharing among data systems.

Project requirements:

1. Define a common data model to share data and provide storage for shared entities.
2. Develop software services that allow all systems to interact with the hub, including batch interfaces for interaction with legacy systems.
3. Handle identity management on shared entities to retrieve authoritative, complete, and unique master entities.
4. Control access to information based on defined security policies.

Initial data challenges

• Data duplication across main data entities and departments.
• Ineffective data sharing: Large software solutions were deployed without support for data sharing between various systems.
• Lack of formal data governance: Common entities were authored and managed through multiple processes.
• Complex organization: Hundreds of municipal services within dozens of departments.

• Distributed IT governance: Each department assumed responsibility for managing the acquired data, as well as deploying and supporting its own services.

Solution & benefits

Ataccama created a data-sharing hub for the city systems across various governmental departments by implementing transactional Master Data Management (MDM) for all available entities.

Benefits:

• A single view of all shared information and entities, ensuring consistency and completeness of information while avoiding redundancy.
• A defined central data model for core, shared entities in the city systems.
• Automatic cleansing and consolidation to ensure a common, clean, trustworthy view of data for all systems. A matching and merging process creates golden records for the mastered entities, maximizing data quality.
• Easy management of an MDM repository for storing master data (including original source data) to be managed and shared across all city systems.
• Compatibility with legacy systems
• Manual issue resolution
• Data monitoring from a user-friendly, collaborative dashboard.
• Easy access to information: Alignment with the Open Data concept by enabling easier access to information.