EDM Council, Solidatus Ally for DCAM RegData Readiness Assessments

London-based data lineage software vendor Solidatus is releasing a free version of its visual data modeling platform to members of data industry body the EDM Council (EDMC), to allow firms to assess their preparedness to handle the data requirements of regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), CCAR, and BCBS 239.

Solidatus will release the regulatory capabilities later this fall, which will be mapped to EDMC’s DCAM (Data Management Capability Assessment Model) framework that financial firms can use to assess the quality of their data management policies against best practices defined by the EDM Council and its membership. The EDMC began work on DCAM after the financial crisis, when firms realized their data supply chains were lacking, and published the first version of the framework in 2014. Now, about 60% of EDMC’s global membership is using the standard in some form, says Mike Meriton, co-founder and head of industry engagement at EDMC.

The vendor will offer two versions of the Solidatus platform in addition to a full-scale implementation: a free, cloud-based instance of the technology spun off specifically for EDMC members, and accessed via the EDMC Connect section of EDMC’s website, which allows them to see any changes to version 2.1 of DCAM to reflect the demands of the new regulations; and a professional-grade proof-of-concept version that allows firms to model the impact of the new regulations more specifically against their internal processes. This intermediate step requires a license, costing £250 per user per month.

“Solidatus becomes a key digital enabler for chief data officers to see scenarios and how they are complying. Members want to harvest information on their work with DCAM and cross-reference that to regulations,” Meriton says. “So members who have assessed their data progress against DCAM can now map their progress against [the data requirements of] regulations like GDPR.”

“Solidatus really excels as a business relationship modeling tool—wherever data, policies, or regulation exists, we can map that interaction, and map it to a regulation or a standard, so a user can click on a specific regulation and immediately see where that impacts their business,” says Solidatus co-founder Philip Dutton. “The back-end of Solidatus is essentially a logically directed graph. We have a rules engine that analyzes your complete metagraph for whatever you design—a change in ownership, or a regulation—and if a rule gets broken, the platform will flag that in the model, and alert users by email.”

In his previous career as a consultant performing technology implementations at financial firms, Dutton says the lack of digital maps showing where data exists throughout an organization hampered and slowed many of the projects. “The same issues always came up—can I trust that data has come from the right place, has it been transformed. … So we decided to create a tool to help us do our day job—something as simple as Excel that could easily be understood visually,” he says.

The result was Solidatus—originally designed to accelerate rollouts and upgrades by modeling the impact of any changes to a firm, the vendor also realized the tool could be used for forward planning purposes, such as assessing the impact of an upcoming regulation, and what needs to be done to satisfy its requirements. In addition, Meriton says the tools provide the data lineage required for successful data programs designed to support commercial activities, such as monetizing internal datasets.