case study
Breaking down silos: turning a data strategy into action for a global energy leader
Sven Van Hoorebeeck
With operations spread across borders and business lines, one international energy player had a clear corporate Data Strategy, but struggled to turn it into action. They turned to BrightWolves to break silos, simplify complexity, and create the foundation for scalable data governance across the group.
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Challenge
Despite having a well-defined Data Strategy, implementation proved difficult due to fragmented ownership and inconsistent processes across departments and countries. Collaboration was limited—even between teams in the same function—and there was no shared understanding of responsibilities or data quality standards. The organization faced several hurdles. Processes were often complex, with unclear ownership and a lack of data lineage, making it hard to trace and resolve quality issues. Business and IT teams were misaligned on how to manage data and who held responsibility for its accuracy, governance, and value. Resistance to change further slowed progress, with each department prioritizing its own agenda over a unified approach.
Turning a corporate Data Strategy into reality isn’t just about frameworks—it’s about aligning people, roles, and ways of working across the entire organization. By focusing on what truly matters to both business and IT, we helped our client move from isolated efforts to a shared, scalable governance model.
Approach
Our tailored approach followed a structured, iterative process:
1. Understanding the starting point: Our team began by interviewing the sponsors of the initiative to identify strategic use-cases. These served as examples to understand pain points. This led us to conduct extensive stakeholder workshops involving both business and IT teams from the five use-cases selected as critical.
From these, we mapped out the current state of data governance practices and identified key issues, including gaps in collaboration between business and IT, as well as unclear responsibilities.
2. Defining a governance framework: Drawing inspiration from the industry’s best practices, coupled with our own practical, knowing-what-works experiences, we addressed accountability issues by defining data governance roles — including Data Stewards, Data Owners, and Product Owners — with defined expectations. Furthermore, we developed standardized definitions for data products and data domains to ensure a common language across the organization. This step was critical, as defining data domains and the role of Data Owner required alignment with the managers who would we assume those roles.
Additionally, we defined new procedures and artefacts to foster collaboration with the newly created roles and develop a future way of working. For example, a data classification guide was developed to help Data Owners and Data Stewards assess the confidentiality and criticality of their data and guide them on the appropriate way to handle it.
3. Creating an implementation roadmap: To start the implementation phase, we defined and aligned a set of data domains across the company’s entities. Data Owners were also identified for each domain to clarify ownership and streamline issue resolution. This domain map was created through collaborative sessions, ensuring they were not too granular or too broad. Based on this exercise, we designed a phased implementation roadmap aligned with organizational goals and priorities, focusing on a selection of domains where we could start implementing the roles, procedures and artefacts previously identified. Early efforts focused on quick wins, such as introducing data contracts between data producers and consumers, to build momentum and demonstrate tangible benefits.
4. Driving change: Through this data governance initiative, we helped foster collaboration between business and IT teams, enabling the company to further strengthen the multidisciplinary product teams by ensuring business knowledge is accurately translated into data transformations. By addressing cultural barriers, emphasizing shared goals, and showcasing tangible impacts through quick wins, the organization positioned itself to adopt a data governance model shared across its different entities. During the roll-out, targeted training sessions were delivered to educate teams about the new roles in place and the methods and tools required for successful implementation.
Need support to realize your Data Strategy? Let’s explore how BrightWolves can help you break silos, align teams, and unlock the full value of your data. Contact Sven to get started.
Impact
By aligning stakeholders and introducing clear roles, the client laid the groundwork for sustainable data governance. Early successes built trust, while the roadmap enabled a phased rollout with momentum. Most importantly, the initiative empowered business and IT to collaborate effectively—translating expertise into action.
Summary
A global energy leader partnered with BrightWolves to turn its corporate Data Strategy into actionable, scalable governance.
We aligned business and IT teams through stakeholder workshops, defined clear roles and data domains, and created a phased implementation roadmap.
By introducing standardized procedures, data contracts, and targeted training, we helped bridge silos and clarify ownership.
This empowered cross-functional collaboration, built early momentum, and set the foundation for long-term, organization-wide data governance.