InsureCorp's Enterprise Metadata Repository Initiative

InsureCorp is a major insurance company with 200 applications, 50 databases, and 12 data warehouses supporting operations in life, health, property, and casualty insurance. A recent regulatory audit found that the company could not demonstrate data lineage for its financial reports, raising concerns about the accuracy of regulatory submissions. The IT department maintains technical documentation in scattered wikis, spreadsheets, and tribal knowledge. Business definitions exist in multiple conflicting business glossaries maintained by individual departments. When the data warehouse team needs to understand a data element's meaning or source, it takes an average of three days to track down the information through emails and meetings. The Chief Data Officer has secured a $2 million budget to implement an enterprise metadata repository. The project must deliver demonstrable regulatory compliance value within nine months and support data discovery for the company's new self-service analytics initiative. There are over 30,000 data elements across all systems that need metadata management.