How Capital One delivers data governance at scale

“It’s hard to even realize how much it’s going to help you,” Gurram says, adding that Capital One has evolved its data governance practice from its previous centralized model to better address a rapidly shifting data landscape.

“In our legacy world, we had a finite set of infrastructure, a finite set of data, and a finite set of users,” Gurram says. “And we used to manage our data governance centrally.”

Under that system, business units would come to the central team for all their data governance needs. The team would make sure all data ran through governance policies and that the business units were meeting all those policies.

“But there has been this whole explosion of data,” Gurram says. “We used to talk about terabytes of data, hundreds of terabytes of data. Now we are talking about hundreds of petabytes of data. Data is coming from everywhere.”

To cope with this explosion, Capital One has established a hybrid data governance practice, with a central enterprise data governance team and federated data governance teams embedded in its lines of business. The central team focuses on building data governance platforms and self-service tools used by the lines of business. It’s also tasked with maintaining the company’s data governance vision and championing a cultural shift in which data is no longer treated as data but as a product.

“All of our policies, all our platforms, all our tools are managed by a central team and built by a central team, but the execution of the data governance comes from federated teams,” Gurram says. “We give the right tools and the platform to our business partners, our lines of business, and they make sure they are getting the data, they are publishing the data based on these policies using a self-service tool.”