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Release date: 8/19/2008
Top disability income and long-term care provider uses DataFlux® dfPower® Studio to enforce data governance rules for company-wide business intelligence initiative.
CARY, N.C. (August 19, 2008) — DataFlux, a leading provider of data quality and data integration solutions, today announced that Berkshire Life Insurance Company of America, a wholly owned stock subsidiary of The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, has selected DataFlux dfPower Studio to power the data quality and data governance efforts for its major corporate business intelligence and decision-support initiatives. After a comprehensive search of data quality technologies, Berkshire Life selected DataFlux to ensure the quality of more than a terabyte of claim and policy data.
In 2006, Berkshire Life began to implement a major business intelligence platform. Ten years of data from three claims systems, two policy administration systems, and multiple actuarial data sources were integrated into a single data warehouse. These source systems were housed within Berkshire as well as its parent company, Guardian Life. Trying to retroactively transform a decade’s worth of data provided a significant challenge, particularly with older systems that had been since retired. Berkshire determined that data quality tools would be necessary to enforce data governance rules to create a usable set of information – and solve the immediate challenge of loading data into the business intelligence platform.
“We chose DataFlux for a combination of its incredible flexibility as well as its power and capabilities,” said Susan Herrmann, a data architect for Berkshire Life. “We wanted a solution that provided full functionality without being tied to any particular platform. We wanted to be able to migrate from batch data quality initiatives to the real-time detection of errors as data is moved from the source. And we needed to trend data quality metrics over time to show improvements and measure the success of our initiative. DataFlux was the only solution to meet each of these criteria.”
Since the company began using DataFlux earlier this year, the data governance team, composed of business and IT users, has identified its first set of critical data elements from the data being loaded into the business intelligence platform. The team is analyzing and identifying quality issues with this critical data in the source system, prior to extracting the data for loading to the platform. This is an important benefit provided by the DataFlux technology; the ability to fix the data both at the source and the store, ensuring data quality throughout all of Berkshire’s systems.
“Berkshire Life realizes that the data quality process is not a simple ‘fix-it-and-forget-it’ activity, but rather an ongoing initiative that requires planning, diligence and powerful tools,” said Tony Fisher, president and CEO of DataFlux. “This company has taken the first step toward a better understanding of its customers and their needs and will be able to provide decision-support tools based on better data.”
About Berkshire Berkshire Life Insurance Company of America, Pittsfield, Mass., is a wholly owned stock subsidiary of The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, New York, N.Y. Its key missions are to grow Guardian’s disability income and long-term care lines of business and to research and develop new insurance products. More information about Berkshire can be obtained at www.BerkshireLife.com.