Orange Spain delivers better business decision making with Collibra

“Before any thought of a tool, the biggest challenge for any organization serious about maximizing its data assets is getting business users to engage with data governance,” said Juan José Alonso, member of the Data Governance Team at Orange Spain. “To get the best data governance program, you need to walk side-by-side with business users and get their buy-in because without it you are going to fail. This is why the ability of Collibra to bridge that gap between business and IT is so important to the data governance journey at Orange Spain.”

Orange Spain, part of the Orange Group, is a telecommunications service provider serving 21 million customers via its Orange, Jazztel and Simyo brands. It provides both consumers and businesses with a range of fixed and mobile telephony, broadband and TV services. 

The telecommunications market in Spain is mature and highly competitive with new, small operators springing up all the time and devouring market share. Data plays a critical role in Orange Spain because it drives critical business decision-making. Typical data assets include network performance, mobile coverage, 4G and 5G users, customer credit scores as well as customer product usage. For instance, to manage churn, Orange Spain not only analyzes customer behavior data, but also data about competitors and offers they make to attract new customers.

Previously, their ability to quickly access the right data and ensure its accuracy was challenging. Data governance was being managed using spreadsheets. When data scientists needed information, they spent days searching for it, and exchanging emails with different business teams to establish data validity.

This kicked off a data governance improvement journey which started by developing a structure of business and data assets and KPIs used to answer business questions. For example, Orange Spain is part of the Orange Group and needs several KPIs to report business performance to the group each month – such as regulatory and compliance information, customer numbers and operational reports.

“When we started on our data governance journey, our business glossary was in a spreadsheet,” stated Alonso. “It was very difficult to maintain, information was difficult to search for and there was no consistency or clarity around data ownership.”

To underpin its data governance journey, Orange Spain selected Collibra as a single solution to easily find and understand data across the organization and enable end-to-end visibility, value and trust. The company ran a detailed selection process, scoring solutions against a series of features. Compared with all leading competitors, Collibra achieved the highest score. The aspects of Collibra that stood out were data catalog and data lineage capabilities. For instance, Collibra lists every data asset, business definition and data owner. It also defines and automates the steps and workflow needed to create new data assets.

“We chose Collibra because it is a tool for the whole company and is accessible for business users as well as IT,” shared Alonso. “Irrespective of your role or technology knowledge, with Collibra you find the data you need and can use it to create new dashboards.”

To deploy the Collibra solution, Orange Spain worked with Collibra and a business partner, helping Orange Spain develop and improve its data governance framework and implement it into Collibra. 

As well as its data warehouse, Collibra was integrated with the company’s data analytics platform and reporting tool.

“Collibra is the place where we can find all the answers to the questions the business is asking,” elaborated Alonso. “Collibra gives Orange Spain a single, centralized view of data across the whole business. It ensures the business accesses the right, high-quality data and it helps us speed up and improve decision-making.”

Collibra helps Orange Spain improve how it addresses several internal, group and external audits. For example, the company has created different GDPR policies in Collibra along with a repository of all the different types of personal data the business holds. Data sets with fields such as customer name, credit card number and email are tagged with meta data to identify and monitor for auditing. “Using Collibra to identify GDPR-related data means we can show auditors what data we hold in seconds,” explained Alonso. “Before, it was a nightmare, and we could spend days exchanging emails and trying to find the information we needed.”

One important aspect of Collibra is helping deliver reliable, accurate and high-quality data. “Because of Collibra, we know the dashboards we have created are serving up clean data to the business,” disclosed Alonso. “That means Orange Spain can make better, more accurate decisions and do so faster than before when we were working with spreadsheet-based data governance.”

Before Collibra, if Alonso wanted to know the number of customers, he could get several different answers from finance, sales and marketing. But, because Collibra ensures one data definition and one data owner, now the business has one, trusted and accurate source for the number of customers.