Data Catalog and Governance Implementation on Snowflake for Major Fiber Optic Provider

The Situation

A German telecommunications company connecting rural areas with fiber optic infrastructure had built a modern cloud data stack — Snowflake, dbt, and Qlik — as part of a multi-year cloud modernization program. But with a portfolio of over 13,000 dashboards and multiple business units operating independently, a new problem had emerged: no one could reliably find, trust, or understand the data assets that existed. Key challenges included:

• No single access point for discovering available reports, datasets, and data products across the organization
• No data lineage visibility — users could not trace where data originated or how it flowed through the platform
• Conflicting KPI definitions across business units with no governance framework to resolve them
• Hidden Snowflake permission issues and configuration gaps the organization was unaware of
• A need to roll out data governance practices to over 200 active data workers across 2,000 employees