Overview:
A central digital agency supporting over 25,000 public servants across multiple public sector agencies in a digitally advanced APAC nation needed a more unified, scalable approach to managing operational data. Each agency was working in silos, duplicating effort, and struggling with delayed reporting. By adopting the Denodo Platform, the agency connected to more than 1,500 data sources without data replication, enabling faster access to operational insights and improved responsiveness to citizen needs.
Why Denodo
- Federated access to 1,500+ sources without centralizing or duplicating sensitive operational data
- Built-in governance and semantic consistency, ensuring trusted, policy-aligned access across departments
- Near real-time performance at scale, including live dashboards updating every 30 seconds
- Self-service and reuse through a governed data marketplace, with new sources onboarded in hours and assets rapidly reused across agencies
Challenges
Despite offering centralized digital services, the agency faced growing operational complexity:
- Long lead times: Onboarding a new data source could take weeks or months due to legacy infrastructure and fragmented access mechanisms.
- Redundant work and data confusion: Multiple agencies independently accessed the same sources (e.g. HR, workforce grants), duplicating effort and producing conflicting reports.
- Lack of coordinated data strategy: Ad-hoc data pulls and reporting lacked consistent semantics and governance, increasing risk and reducing trust in insights.
- Demand for shared services with autonomy: Departments wanted self-service capabilities but still needed guidance, standards, and reuse of trusted data assets.
Solution
The team deployed Denodo’s logical data management platform to establish a governed access layer across legacy technologies like SQL Server, Oracle, Excel, SharePoint, and Access, as well as modern SaaS systems and APIs. This architecture provided secure, unified semantics, and policy-aligned access to operational data, without replicating datasets or building point-to-point integrations, and without disrupting existing infrastructure.
To support a broader user base, they developed a data marketplace-style environment on top of this access layer. The marketplace offered:
- Searchable, curated data products with semantic consistency
- Usability for non-technical users, reducing dependence on backend IT teams
- Policy-aligned access controls embedded directly in the architecture
- Performance optimization via intelligent caching and real-time delivery mechanisms
Benefits
- Connected to clinical systems in just 4 hours, enabling rapid integration of real time patient data
- Delivered a live Emergency Department dashboard within 4 weeks, with updates every 30 seconds to monitor wait times, bed capacity, and triage flows
- Enabled multi agency policy analysis by blending records from law enforcement, health, housing, and transport, reducing delivery time from months to days
- Eliminated redundant data pulls and manual reporting overlaps, which reduced rework and integration effort across departments
- Adoption continues to grow, with the platform becoming the preferred standard for secure and scalable data access across public sector departments
