Going through a digital transformation to build a data-driven ecosystem is not always an easy task for companies. Now imagine this task for an enterprise over 50 years old and with 5.5 billion data points in a portfolio of 11 million contracts.

The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. (known as Freddie Mac), an entity that supports the U.S. housing finance system, has successfully overcome these challenges, so much so that it was announced this week as the winner of the Collibra Excellence Award for Data Program of the Year.

“What started as a reducing cost or looking at an infrastructure play, moving from physical data assets to the cloud, as well as enhancing our resiliency, has quickly morphed into meeting business demand and objectives whether it be for sourcing, servicing or securitization of our loan products,” said Aravind Jagannathan (pictured, middle), chief data officer and vice president at Freddie Mac.

Jagannathan; Ankit Goel (pictured, right), VP of data transformation and analytics solutions at Freddie Mac; and Atif Malik (pictured, left), senior director of business data architecture and cloud data transformation at Freddie Mac, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Data Citizens ’21 event. They discussed the difficulties of creating a data-based architecture, how Collibra NV solutions helped on this journey, the importance of the Data Program of the Year award and expectations for the future. (* Disclosure below.)

Collaboration between business and technology is critical

When Freddie Mac started thinking about creating an information hub, a major challenge was figuring out how to continue to feed the legacy and spread across multiple assets while building the new data highway. Another issue was to find the best way to transform, translate and move data and assets to this new data platform.

“What we’ve been striving for is looking at what is the business demand or what is the business use case and what’s the value to help prioritize that transformation,” Jagannathan explained.

The company selected and implemented the Collibra NV platform to centralize its data strategy and build a cohesive, agile, scalable and cost-effective data program. Later, it integrated a consolidated business glossary, configured and ingested data dictionaries, and established the Collibra Data Governance Center as the standard tool for data and metadata governance.

Freddie Mac also built a Collibra Center of Excellence to provide the overall framework from a people and process perspectives, focus on using Collibra and adopt best practices.

“We can have teams that are focused just on developing best practices and implementing workflows and lineage within Collibra,” Malik said. “It provides the central hub of people being domain experts on the tool that can then be leveraged by different groups within the organization to maintain the tool.”

Collaboration between the business and technology teams has been fundamental in this process, according to Goel. Freddie Mac began an agile transformation two years ago, and that entailed moving from project teams to persistent product teams that brought business and technology together.

“We’ve really been able to pioneer that in the data space within Freddie Mac, where we have now teams with product owners coming from the data team and then full-stack IT developers with them, creating these combined teams to meet the business needs,” Goel stated. “We found that bringing these teams together really removed the barriers that were there in the interaction, and the employee satisfaction has been high.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Data Citizens ’21 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Data Citizens ’21. Neither Collibra NV, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE