Celcom implements Project Axon as the future of data governance

The company was recognised with the Information Management - Telecommunications trophy at the Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards 2022. 

Managing data for its usability, availability, reliability, amongst other things, constitute a successful implementation of a data governance solution, and Celcom Axiata Berhad’s (Celcom) Project Axon was recognised as a leading force when they were handed the Information Management - Telecommunications trophy at the Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards 2022. 

The awards programme recognises major innovators and players in the tech industry of Malaysia, and Celcom’s Project Axon set an example on how to lay the foundations of data governance and the benefits companies can reap from a successful implementation. 

In collaboration with Informatica, Celcom’s Enterprise Data Governance team implemented the foundational data governance tools such as Informatica’s Axon Data Governance, Enterprise Data Catalogue, Data Engineering Integration and Data Quality,  as an integrated, modular enterprise data governance solution that enables the discovery and profiling of data in Celcom’s sources and systems. These modules also enable data quality measuring and monitoring. 

Being a business-friendly platform, Project Axon aggregates information of critical data across the organisation as well as providing dashboards and diagrams on data quality and lineage of critical data. Having such a tool with Celcom mitigated instances of misinformation, inaccurate reporting, and loss of trust in data. 

Thanks to Project Axon, data users can have a shared understanding of data across all functions and an aligned view on the quality of their data, therefore building confidence and trust on the data at hand, propelling the organisation to be data-driven. 

Since its launch, Project Axon has simplified processes to check for data quality in data report submissions to the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), effectively automating a 150-hour manual process into a 5-hour task, amounting to a 3000% spike in efficiency as well as data accuracy from 81% to an average of 98%. The benefits are not only in time saved but also in terms of costs, as improved data quality saves the company the risk from RM50,000 regulatory compounds due to a single invalid data record. 

The need for an effective data governance solution and tool has been one of Celcom’s growing challenges due to the fact that without such a tool, users cannot check for the health of their data and scan databases to understand what kind of data is at hand. With this, various metadata and information can be captured around critical data, giving more insight on what’s needed in a data-driven business.

Project Axon and the solutions that came with it enable a host of other critical data uses aside from MCMC reports, such as fraud management and checks on billing data. As the platform and the implementation further matures, more use cases are anticipated for what has been Celcom’s successful data governance implementation, as Informatica’s integrated, modular solution sets the foundation on the basics of what has to be done, and Celcom looks towards implementing master data management and data protection management on top of what’s already available