Implementing Data Governance and Data Management for England’s Largest Specialist Housing and Care Provider

Anchor is England’s largest not-for-profit provider of housing and care for people in later life. It is an organisation of significant scale serving more than 65,000 residents in 54,000 homes across almost 1,700 locations.

Anchor identified a requirement to improve organisational data governance and data management. As part of its digital and technology transformation programme, Anchor is implementing new technology which will benefit both colleagues and residents. Anchor recognised the need for the implementation of best practice data governance and data management to support the transformation of the organisation. There were few usable examples available for this, so Anchor commissioned a project to develop the necessary data architecture, governance and management. Following a competitive tender process, Jaywing was awarded the contract based on our experience of conducting similar exercises across different industry sectors and our pragmatic and collaborative approach to delivery.

In the first phase, our data management specialists worked with Anchor to firstly define a logical enterprise entity model covering all information required for Anchor to do business initially focussing on the core components of Customers, Properties and Services. Secondly, a data dictionary was created that documented the accepted terminology and definitions for all entities in the model, considering and recording differences in terminology between different Anchor business areas. Both the model and dictionary were developed with and reviewed by key, non-technology stakeholders, ensuring business acceptance. The model and dictionary would serve as key components in the development of Anchor’s data lake and supporting data governance and data management.

In the second phase, we worked with Anchor to define the processes required for effective data governance and data management enterprise wide. This involved defining the necessary data governance and management tasks, designing appropriate processes for these tasks and ensuring that the necessary information was recorded as part of each process. This was all based on Jaywing’s extensive experience of best practice in these fields across a range of industry sectors. The processes, tasks and information were trialled with the team in Anchor responsible for data governance and data management, to ensure that these were fully understood. Over a three-month period, Jaywing provided consulting expertise and tangible deliverables that have given Anchor the necessary view of their enterprise data, plus the industry best practice data governance and data management processes, to support their data strategy and ongoing transformation of their data landscape to one that demonstrates best practice at all stages.