Data catalog transforms data silos into data goldmines

Outokumpu is a global leader in sustainable stainless steel, with 8,500 employees in nearly 30 countries. Taking a data catalog in use is a key enabler in the company’s ambitious digital transformation aimed at increasing efficiency and maintaining its position in sustainable stainless steel innovation. It is also an important part of their data strategy implementation.  

Moving towards data products

A data catalog is a community platform that enables people who know about organization’s data and people who need this knowledge, to come together and collaborate. A data catalog tool enables documenting the business context as well as technical metadata in a structured format that makes it discoverable and easier to interpret. It can also show the data’s lineage, or roots, which helps users trust it.  

Today, businesses are drowning in data and starving for insights. Worse, much of this data, which includes undocumented tacit knowledge, easily gets lost, siloed, or wasted. “We had numerous data documentation, visibility, and usability issues. This led us to pursue a data catalog,” said Paulius Šimkūnas, Head of Data at Outokumpu. 

Data catalogs help data producers curate data and publish good quality data products for data consumers to leverage for high quality reporting and analytics solutions. Data products are data assets that contain all the components needed to efficiently process and store the data for analytical or data-intensive use.

Solita helped Outokumpu map and evaluate their different business- and data management needs and challenges, as well as navigate technology options during the initial proof-of-value project. In a second project, Solita put the chosen solution into production.

“Data Catalog is one of the trending topics in the enterprises. As the data resides in various warehouses and datalakes, it is crucial to make the best out of those investments by discoverability and understandable business language. Solita’s technology agnostic approach with change management ingredient has proven to be an impactful recipe to help our customers in managing data assets”, states Auli Peltola, Head of strategic growth at Solita.

Data products improve the quality and time-to-value of data solutions and thus, help the business to achieve its goals. By enabling organization-wide data discovery, a data catalog helps businesses turn their data into goldmines. Seeing the need for a data catalog, Outokumpu wanted a partner experienced in ramping up a data catalog, both technology and culture.

“Data products are an essential part of efficient data supply chains and data catalog is a tool that enables the adoption of data products. Outokumpu’s data strategy had a strong emphasis towards better data discovery and more efficient data sharing, which created an excellent foundation for data catalog initiative as the executive support was in place during the whole journey”, said Juha-Pekka Joutsenlahti, Data Catalog Lead at Solita

“We chose to work with Solita because of their broad experience implementing data catalogs and deep knowledge across various of businesses. Solita also shares our data product mindset, which makes it easy to converse with them on these matters. They were also very appreciative of and flexible in meeting our business needs,” explained Šimkūnas.

Helping people to change the way they work as a key to success

Taking new solutions in use is never only about technology. To succeed, it is crucial to be able to help people change the way they work and utilize new services effectively.

“We always start by understanding the problem our customers want to solve. Then we design the solution. This bottom-up approach ensures that we address the specific challenges that our customers face and that we can co-design the solution with them,” said Minna Kärhä, Senior Data Business Designer at Solita.

For that reason, Solita interviewed and gathered insight from over twenty Outokumpu employees to identify challenges and opportunities. These key stakeholders were also engaged to test the catalog options and share their feedback and learnings.

“We know from experience that ‘installing’ new technology is the easy part. Behavioral change is hard, and it takes time to ensure people will use it — and stick to it. That’s why taking the end-users onboard from the beginning is so crucial,” said Minna Kärhä from Solita.

After gathering deep and broad understanding of the challenges involved and the available technological solutions, Solita helped Outokumpu choose and implement a suitable data catalog. To lead the adoption and communicate the progress a vision, business case and a comprehensive roadmap were created. These help to make sure that the data catalog will become an integral part of Outokumpu’s architectural landscape and the new way of working with data becomes a daily habit.

Outokumpu’s favored data catalog tool automated metadata tagging and annotation, promising to reduce the workload of data workers struggling to find, use, and share data due to a lack of documentation. It also offered better connectivity, user experience, and collaboration features compared to other technologies evaluated. 

Improved data organization, time savings, and value creation

“One of our main goals for the data catalog was to reduce the amount of time spent looking for data, and thus save money”, said Šimkūnas.

Thanks to the data catalog, the data is now more organized, making it easier to find, access, and understand. Although the data catalog has yet to be fully implemented, the results are promising. Even with limited use of the data catalog, precious time spent searching for data could be reduced by 10–25%. This means that tens of thousands of hours spent gathering data could be spent creating value, lowering the time-to-value for daily tasks.

The data catalog can save Outokumpu a lot of time and allow them to produce more value in many ways, both big and small. For example, knowing what data exists, where it comes from, and how it is used allows data governance experts to do their jobs and implement the company’s data strategy.

Besides enabling data users to discover new ways to use data to improve business processes and generate new ideas, the data catalog will also speed up the onboarding of new team members and establish a common language for discussing Outokumpu data, thereby improving overall communication. By quickly identifying and eliminating obsolete data, it reduces cybersecurity risks and data storage and migration costs.

“Once complete, the data catalog will prove to be the centerpiece of our data strategy,” concluded Šimkūnas. “Even in ideal circumstances, making a data catalog is easier said than done. There are so many moving parts and so many things that can go wrong along the way. However, thanks to Solita, who guided and supported us every step of the way, we now have a solid foundation to build on.” 

All photos by ©Outokumpu