No business connects 16 million customers to the world and brings in $15.5 billion in annual revenue without continuously pioneering the latest technology.
For Canadian telecom giant TELUS, that means continual, incremental progress across its entire network — implementing solutions like metadata-driven automation to deliver better services to customers and empower the business.
TELUS teamed up with Collibra in 2019 on a journey to maximize the value of its metadata through innovative automation.
Two top TELUS titans — Data Strategy and Enablement Director Carine Botturi and Senior Technology Architect Sarah Ness — shared the story of that journey at the Data Citizens 2024 conference in Orlando, Florida.
The rise of TELUS the technology-driven company
TELUS is Canada’s fastest-growing telecommunications company with nearly 80,000 team members working worldwide toward its goal of becoming a technology-driven company.
Alongside its motto of “giving back where we live” — including $1.3 billion in charitable contributions and over a million hours of annual volunteer community service — TELUS operates in verticals such as communications, online security, smart home security, health and agriculture.
But with this acquisition-based growth comes data — a lot of it. “When it comes to data, one word [applies]: complexity,” Carine says. “We still need to work with and try to integrate legacy systems.” The challenge TELUS faces is what to do with the data it’s accumulated. What to use, and how much of it?
To answer these seemingly simple questions — top of mind for TELUS execs — the company implemented a data management program to get a proper read of its data landscape. “Collibra has been our partner [in this] since the beginning,” Carine highlights.
Four critical pillars of success
To set itself up for success and get the most out of its metadata, TELUS implemented a strategy founded on four pillars:
- Deliberate strategy: Businesses need to know what they want to achieve and where they want to go — rather than dealing in half measures. “We are not in the business of building [network] connectors,” Carine says. “We are in the business of achieving business outcomes [and] solving business issues.” Set sights on the defined goal and work toward it
- Opportunity management: TELUS must demonstrate value for annual budget and resource requests. “Whether in technology or in people, each investment needs to be tied to the value we are going to create,” Carine says. “We need to identify the high-value opportunities in order to create a capability-driven roadmap.”
- Building blocks: “It’s not just about the platform,” Carine says. “We need to continuously deliver reusable, sustainable and high-value components.” The building blocks of TELUS are process, people, technology and change management
- Readiness and maturity: TELUS is prepared to move and grow anywhere, anytime. Each year, it assesses its maturity level and ability to pivot to new opportunities. “We need to continuously plan, act and evaluate for iterative improvement and optimization,” Carine says
Relying on these four pillars has enabled TELUS to directly contribute to data democratization.
“We’ve broken data silos and, most importantly, given time back to data citizens,” Carine says.
The metadata capability journey
In five years, TELUS has increased its metadata completeness and quality — and business value — with the following capabilities:
- 2020 – Enabling data citizens to find the information they need
- 2021 – Understanding context and managing metadata to drive business documentation, privacy security classification, and personal information identification
- 2022 – Increasing trust by working with data quality and driving adoption
- 2023 – Collaborating to expand platform adoption and generate high-value use cases
- 2024 – Continuing the path of metadata distribution and use
The results speak for themselves:
- Adoption: User numbers jumped to 5,000 from 2,000 in 2022, including 121 metadata content stewards. Over 70% of these users were returning users and 89% stated that the metadata available to them was useful and helped them do their jobs better.
- Metadata availability: 25 million assets, including a business glossary of 1,300 terms, data, reports, and API catalogs, as well as 56 million asset relations.
- Cost avoidance: Time spent pursuing data dropped from four hours per week to just 50 minutes with the data repository.
- Team evolution: The metadata and data quality center of excellence (CoE) grew from two part-time workers to 16 team members implementing TELUS’s end-to-end program based on the building blocks of process, people, technology, and change management (or vision).
The TELUS journey highlights the importance of finding, understanding and trusting business terms, data assets, reports and APIs to capture business context. Doing so is what makes metadata automation possible.
“We have created a virtual cycle of feedback in order to keep on enhancing the capabilities we have already developed so that we create and we reinforce,” Carine explains. TELUS has a critical mass of metadata, classification, and lineage information. “We are now ready to support system readability and enable metadata automation,” she adds.
Enter metadata-driven automation
Businesses want to automate processes to reduce manual work, increase speed and free up time to focus on maximizing value. Metadata automation — “the automated use of metadata to discover, understand, trust, track and observe data in real time,” Sarah explains — has the same goals.
Data stewards and analysts typically collect and catalog technical metadata for both regulatory and business reasons: Companies must remain compliant and ethical while mining the gold — data — for profit. “But that’s a big task,” Sarah says. “There’s a lot of data out there: It’s big, distributed and keeps coming at us — exponentially.”
What’s not been tapped yet is the business metadata — “the stuff that adds really rich context,” Sarah says. Data consumers want to observe this data, “to understand the health and state of it as it moves through systems,” she explains. So how do businesses get a hold of it?
To maximize metadata value through automation, TELUS uses the following strategy:
- Catalog and govern operational and intelligence data and the business glossary — for a common language essential to integration and automation — with data stewardship that curates data and keeps it in good shape
- Focus on completeness and quality — which equals data enrichment and business trust — through classification, policies and business lineage
- Integrate and collaborate with APIs to increase common language-based integration and interoperability, event management and event-driven architecture, and real-time access control
- Automate the use of metadata
Through this process, “we get to that nice, beautiful, everything’s automated catalog,” Sarah says. “People are using metadata and we’ve got that metadata automation. We move towards an ecosystem where we enter [the ecosystem] once and we use [that ecosystem] often.”
Metadata automation in action
The partnership between TELUS and Collibra showcases innumerable use cases for metadata automation, including issue resolution, security, DevOps, architecture, data analysis and science, and decision-making.
Increasing reliability, agility, monetization, and metadata-driven automation significantly boosts:
- Customer excellence
- Revenue generation
- Brand protection
Automated metadata meets business, technical, and operational goals with the winning trifecta of finding, understanding, and trusting data — in real-time. Collibra ensures enterprises reliably get there by providing a data intelligence platform to drive automation and make metadata work for businesses, rather than the other way around.
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This article is based on the TELUS discussion at the Data Citizens 2024 conference in Orlando, FL, bringing together the world’s most innovative community of data leaders to experience breakthrough solutions.
