The Customer: Who they are
A national telecom operator serving millions of subscribers across mobile and fixed-line services.
The Challenge: Identifying the villain
Subscriber data was scattered across billing, CRM, and network provisioning systems, each with its own definition of an “active customer.” No one could produce a reliable, end-to-end lineage for personal data — a direct exposure under GDPR, and increasingly under NIS2’s operational resilience requirements.
The Journey: The search for a solution
The operator’s internal data team had built partial data dictionaries in spreadsheets, but these went stale within weeks of any system change and weren’t trusted by compliance or IT.
The Discovery: Finding IDS
The operator’s CDO had seen IDS’s governance framework work referenced in a banking peer’s compliance review and reached out directly for a metadata management engagement.
The Solution: The hero arrives
IDS deployed IBM IGC for the enterprise metadata catalog and Informatica MDM for the subscriber golden record, backed by a standardized data modelling approach so new systems would inherit governance rules automatically rather than requiring rework each time.
The Implementation: The battle
The team prioritized personal-data domains first to close the GDPR exposure fastest, then extended metadata coverage to network and billing systems. The main obstacle: legacy provisioning systems with undocumented interfaces. IDS reverse-engineered lineage from system logs where documentation didn’t exist.
The Results: The happy ending
- Metadata coverage: from ~20% to 90%+ of critical data domains
- Subscriber golden record accuracy improved to 98%+
- NIS2 audit passed with no major findings on data traceability
- Time to answer a data lineage question: from days to minutes
“For the first time, we can actually answer ‘where did this data come from’ — not guess.” — Data Governance Lead
Technologies used: IBM IGC · Informatica MDM · custom data modelling frameworks