Identified Needs
Like most organizations, the city council operates with isolated departments where information does not flow freely, creating data silos that proliferate uncontrolled data exchange and the establishment of alternative paths to share it. All responsibility falls on the IT department, which lacks functional knowledge of the data. The main problems identified are:
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Lack of culture in data management and access control.
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Difficulty identifying the origin of erroneous data.
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Data access managed by IT without a defined data request procedure.
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Existence of a large number of decentralized and heterogeneous data repositories.
Use Case: End-to-End Data Marketplace
The implemented use case provides the city council with a true Data Marketplace that encompasses and centralizes the previously isolated view of all departments. The following actions were carried out:
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Collection of the different information sources and their origins. The tools connect and transform the dispersed and disaggregated view of departments into a central model that meets the various information consumption needs.
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Location of sensitive information, demonstrating the semantic and advanced search capabilities of the Data Marketplace. Ability to tag data structures that trigger the execution of normalization policies.
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Declaration of data source lineage, from its origin to its consumption by city council users.
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Self-service data access requests in a governed manner, incorporating the Data Marketplace as an autonomous access mechanism for all users.
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Demonstration of an end-to-end Data Marketplace build: data exposure through DSAs, data search and purchase via shopping cart, contract signing, and access granting without the need to use third-party systems.
Proposed Objectives
The use case selected and developed in Anjana Data aims to provide the city council with a platform that enables:
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Self-service data access requests in a governed manner by city council users, without requiring IT intervention.
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Elimination of bottlenecks caused by excessive workload in the IT department, giving business users greater control over information.
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Incorporation of a Data Marketplace as the best way to establish autonomous and governed access management for all users.
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Simplification of technological complexity: with a complex technology stack where different technologies coexist, the goal is for anyone to understand data flows and the end-to-end data journey.
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Adapting Anjana Data to the current view that city council users have of their systems, making it a familiar and user-friendly platform.
Functional and Technical Architecture
The architecture integrates Denodo as a data virtualization layer over SQL Server and PostgreSQL sources, with Anjana Data as the cross-cutting governance platform. Anjana plugins act on the catalogued data model, enabling catalog, audit, lineage, data contracts, policies, and business glossary.
Benefits Obtained
Once the use case was completed and after a brief operational period, the following benefits were observed:
Thanks to the combined capabilities of Anjana Data and Denodo, users no longer need to contact IT: they self-manage their data needs in a fully governed manner.
Anjana Data provides a single portal where any city council role can search for any data in their own language, without needing to go directly into Denodo.
With a central catalog, all users — not just technical staff or IT — can access information in a much more approachable and less technical way.
Everything that happens in the Data Marketplace occurs in an orderly and governed manner, mapping current city council procedures or new ones generated by the initiative.
Introduction of an agnostic semantic layer with business terminology, metrics, and KPIs that helps business users find what they need in their own language.
Challenges Overcome
The challenges overcome were both technological and functional. Below are some of the most notable ones:
Creation of a common environment for a coordinated deployment of Anjana Data and Denodo on an existing architecture with high technological complexity.
Specific components were developed to fully address the use case requirements, adapting the platform to the city council's own workflows and processes.
Low Data Governance maturity at the city council, breaking down barriers around what it means to have a semantic layer over technical assets and demonstrating the value it brings through real execution scenarios.