WoodmenLife gains time and accuracy using Alation data services

WoodmenLife, the Omaha, Nebraska-based fraternal society insurance organization, took some steps in the past few years to improve its handling of data. These included adding Power BI and Snowflake to its operations. The firm found, however, that it still needed to be better able to discover data and use it for measurement and governance.

Kam Rokon, data officer, WoodmenLife.

For that, it turned to Alation, a data analytics and management provider, said Kam Rokon, data officer at the firm. “We didn’t prioritize optimization from a data and architecture and technology perspective,” he recalled. “That led us down a path of getting very polluted with Access databases and Excel files, which are very manual.”

Using Alation, WoodmenLife can now find the sources of data and choose the most relevant source for a piece of information, according to Rokon. “Being able to show that value of data and then helping people connect that from a data perspective can help you see how a brand new product that we started selling, how it’s actually doing, versus just going off of, here’s our member counts and here’s how much in premiums we’re getting,” he said. “Now they have a much more in-depth knowledge and ability to make a business decision based on these metrics that we’re able to create from data now.”

WoodmenLife also uses Alation to improve the accuracy of its information. For example, with customer information, a sales rep may enter a phone number and notes about the client. A phone number including alphanumeric values like area codes can create an issue for the back office. Alation is, Rokon said, “essentially teaching people how to use data, why data is important, why it’s good to keep data and why data quality matters. Alation, being such an easy tool to use, can really start right out of the gate and find instantaneous value.”

The firm has been able to be proactive with Alation governing its data in the cloud, rather than WoodmenLife having to clean its data on-premises. “Alation scans it and tells you if it’s going into our ETL, if it’s going to our enterprise data warehouse, and then it’s going to all these reports,” Rokon said. “Being able to do that in a way that’s more — not only is it quicker, but you’re also being more effective because you’re not governing data that you may never use again and that’s actually not even pertinent to moving forward with.”

Rokon estimates that the time WoodmenLife data staff spent in data discovery, scrubbing and cleaning was about 85%, leaving just 15% of the time for using analytics on the data. Alation has flipped that ratio, Rokon said. “Now they’re able to use way more time to actually analyze the data,” he said, adding that before, “we never had visibility to the granularity that we would effectively want.”