Investment Firm Establishes Scalable Data Governance with Microsoft Fabric, Purview, and phData
Customer's Challenge
Amid migrating its data warehouse from Azure/SQL to Microsoft Fabric, a renowned international investment firm sought to lay a strong governance foundation for its evolving analytics capabilities. Aiming to address persistent data quality challenges and upskill its business users’ data governance knowledge, the firm turned to phData to help establish a scalable data governance program alongside the technical migration.Â
phData's Solution
phData designed a tailored data governance framework to align with the client’s business objectives and enterprise-wide governance goals. Using a walk-crawl-run methodology, we launched a Data Governance 1.0 model—introducing data ownership and stewardship, data contracts, a data certification process, and targeted business glossaries—to establish a scalable foundation for future growth.
Results
What began as a landscape with no formal governance practice evolved into a scalable, foundational framework that now guides data-related decisions and priorities across the organization. The client established clear roles for data ownership and stewardship, developed a metadata collection strategy, and implemented a formal data certification process that ensures accountability and trust in certified data assets.
Data quality, previously unmanaged, is now proactively monitored through standardized issue tracking and alerting mechanisms. Business users, once skeptical of the data, now rely on certified data products supported by documentation, lineage, and defined business context through targeted glossaries.Â
Additionally, the client now maintains structured and thorough documentation for all data within the client’s Microsoft Fabric Data Estate, creating a more transparent and reliable data ecosystem embedded within the Microsoft Purview platform.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| No Data Governance Practice | Scalable, Foundational Practice with a clear framework for guiding decisions and priorities. |
| Data Quality Issues | Enabled a data quality monitoring and alerting process. |
| Lack of Business User trust in the data | Created a data certification process that ensures proper ownership and oversight of data assets to instill trust in certified data products. |
| No documentation of the current environment | Within the data certification process, enabled documentation requirements around data contracts, lineage, Power BI report BRDs, and business glossaries. Currently, a mix of automated and manual efforts as the tool matures. |
The Full Story
A leading multinational investment firm was undergoing a major data platform transition to Microsoft Fabric. Given the level of investment, leadership also aimed to address longstanding challenges from the legacy environment—issues that a simple migration wouldn’t resolve.Â
These included persistent data quality problems and the lack of foundational governance capabilities such as data lineage, master data management, and classification. Such gaps had severely limited the organization’s ability to understand and trust its data, eroding confidence among business stakeholders.Â
Recognizing the transition’s strategic significance, the firm saw an opportunity to embed a robust data governance framework alongside the migration. The goal was to restore trust, ensure data accountability, and establish a scalable, sustainable governance program for the future.
Faced with limited internal expertise and resources, the client needed a partner to help build a scalable, enterprise-grade data governance program while simultaneously upskilling the internal team to take ownership in the future.
The Key pillars included:
- Establishing data ownership and stewardship roles across business domains
- Defining and instituting data contracts to clarify expectations and responsibilities
- Launching a formal data certification process, complete with workflow diagrams and document templates
- Implementing targeted business glossaries within Microsoft Purview to create shared definitions and business context for critical data assets
To drive adoption and build long-term capability, phData first collaborated closely with executive and director-level stakeholders to clarify governance objectives and organizational priorities. phData orchestrated education sessions to showcase the capabilities of Microsoft Purview and define what effective governance could look like with the client’s existing tech stack. In addition, a dedicated data governance working group was established, bringing together C-level and director participants from across the enterprise to champion the initiative.
phData then architected and delivered a custom 8-point data governance framework. This roadmap addressed not just the technical aspects of governance, but also the people and process changes required for sustained success. The new framework introduced clear processes and escalation paths for surfacing and tracking data quality issues, standardized onboarding for new data sources, detailed documentation procedures, and much more—all wired into the client’s new Microsoft Fabric environment.
Through this structured and collaborative engagement, the investment firm translated its vision for modern analytics into a practical, scalable data governance foundation—empowering business users, enabling proactive data quality management, and setting the stage for continuous innovation as the organization grows.
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