Customer Success Story

From Spreadsheets to Self-Sufficient Data Governance: How a Leading Canadian Insurer Activated IDMC in 12 Weeks

PDI moved governance from Excel and email into Informatica IDMC, connected business definitions to technical data, made data quality measurable, and enabled the client's own team to apply the same governance pattern to a second critical business service.

12 Weeks

Data Governance MVP

2 Critical Services

Governed during the engagement

Up to 50 Columns

Profiled for data quality

Up to 25 Rules

Data quality rules implemented

About the Customer

The customer is a leading Canadian insurance and wealth management company supporting business-critical processes including life insurance claims and investment fund administration. The organization had already invested in Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), including Cloud Data Governance and Catalog (CDGC) and Cloud Data Quality (CDQ).

The next step was to turn that platform investment into an operating governance capability that its own team could sustain and extend after the engagement.

Customer Challenges

The company had made meaningful progress on governance, but much of that intellectual capital still lived in Excel workbooks and disconnected documentation. Business glossary terms, critical data elements, and personas had been defined, but they were not connected to the systems where data actually flowed.

  • Business definitions were disconnected from technical assets. Spreadsheet-based glossary content could not be easily linked to harvested metadata.
  • Data quality was not being measured systematically. Issues could surface downstream instead of being monitored against defined business rules.
  • Governance approvals depended on email. The organization lacked consistent workflows and an auditable approval trail.
  • Internal self-sufficiency mattered. The client wanted not only an implementation, but a team that could continue operating the governance model independently.

PDI Solution

PDI used a deliver-one, enable-one model. PDI implemented the complete governance pattern for the life insurance claims process while the client's team shadowed the implementation and applied the same approach in parallel to a second critical service in wealth management.

Enablement happened throughout the 12-week engagement rather than being deferred to project close. By the time the MVP was demonstrated, the internal team had already applied the governance pattern itself on a second use case.

Key Governance Components

  • Business glossary connected to technical metadata. Existing glossary assets were imported from Excel into CDGC and linked to harvested technical terms, including tagging against the company's common information model.
  • Governed approval workflows. Three approval workflows replaced ad hoc email approvals with consistent, auditable governance processes.
  • Persona-based access. Up to five personas were configured with role-based access appropriate to administrators, stewards, and business users.
  • Measurable data quality. PDI profiled up to 50 critical columns, implemented up to 25 business-defined quality rules, and delivered a data quality scorecard dashboard.
  • Dev-to-UAT promotion discipline. PDI promoted the solution into UAT, triaged and resolved UAT issues, and documented the promotion process.
  • Runbooks and adoption. Knowledge-transfer sessions, runbooks, and persona-based adoption workshops equipped the internal team to continue operating the platform.

Results

The organization's existing IDMC investment became an active governance capability spanning catalog, glossary, data quality, workflow, and business-critical data.

Two critical services governed within the engagement. While PDI delivered governance for the first service, the client's team implemented the second using the same pattern.

A self-sufficient internal team. The client completed the engagement having configured scanners, imported glossary content, and applied the governance model themselves, supported by runbooks and recorded knowledge transfer.

Greater trust in critical operational data. Linked business and technical terms plus a live quality scorecard provide clearer evidence about the data supporting claims and fund administration.

A repeatable governance blueprint. Discovery, cataloging, glossary linkage, quality rules, workflows, and promotion now form a documented pattern for additional services.

About Pacific Data Integrators

Pacific Data Integrators (PDI) is an Informatica partner specializing in data governance, data quality, MDM, cloud modernization, and enterprise data management. PDI combines implementation expertise with structured enablement so customers can continue operating and extending their platforms after delivery.

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