BBC Studios Transforms Data Governance with Sifflet: multiple countries, 87 Checks, 50+ Users Empowered

Founded in 2018, BBC Studios is the principal commercial arm of the British Broadcasting Corporation group. It is responsible for producing and distributing BBC content globally; creating and selling TV shows, documentaries and other media; managing the BBC’s commercial interests and intellectual property rights; and generating revenue to support the BBC’s public service broadcasting.

The entity operates as a subsidiary, allowing it to generate international sales and productions. But its complex structure, including production, finance, HR, and multiple brands like Top Gear and Blue, posed challenges for data governance. Fair trading issues between BBC Studios and BBC public service added another layer of complexity in data utilization.

The Challenge: Bridging the Gap Between Technical Data Management and Business User Accessibility at BBC Studios

BBC Studios approached Sifflet at the very beginning of its data governance journey. Up until then, a centralized team had been managing data. To empower business teams and lines, however, the data governance teams wanted to shift more ownership, visibility, and understanding out to data users with a data-mesh and self-serve approach.

However, their data warehouse - Snowflake - while very technically robust, was not able to deliver information to non-technical users in easily accessible, understandable formats. This meant that business teams had little understanding and knowledge of their data, and impeded data democratization. The data team also needed an observability solution that could speed time incident management and resolution above and beyond supporting a new self-serve approach. 

How BBC Studios Built a Strong Data Governance Framework with Sifflet: Mapping Critical Assets, Empowering Teams, and Accelerating Incident Resolution

Sifflet’s platform allowed BBC Studios to set out on their governance journey by mapping high-value critical data assets to identify key data owners within business lines. From there, the team worked with these users to: 

• educate them on understanding their own data with access to metadata in Sifflet
• showcasing how monitoring and lineage works and incident implications downstream for their assets 

"Sifflet Makes Data Understandable for Everyone—Not Just Engineers" "Sifflet provides such a good UI for a user of any kind of level to utilize it and understand their data. It’s really business focused and it translates metadata in a way that a technically focused warehouse can’t."

Joshua Kaliroy, Head of Governance

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This resulted in more empowered teams with end-to-end visibility into their data and better understanding of their assets for more informed conversations.

In parallel, technical teams benefited from significant gains in efficiency thanks to significant increases in data accuracy and speed to incident resolution.

BBC Studios' Data Governance Transformation: 139 Assets Monitored, 87 Quality Checks, 50+ Users Empowered

• Data Coverage: Many data assets monitored across multiple countries, with 87 automated quality checks, 70 of which were labeled as critical severity to maintain data integrity.
• Efficiency Gains: Faster incident detection and resolution, reducing downtime and boosting confidence in data-driven decisions.
• Collaboration & Accessibility: Over 50 business and technical users empowered with comprehensive documentation, streamlined quality checks, and enhanced data lineage visibility for better cross-team collaboration.
• Business Impact: High-quality, governed data now supports critical operations and decision-making, with optimized workflows delivering significant efficiency gains across teams.

Through this structured approach, BBC Studios now operates with greater transparency, ownership, and efficiency in data governance, driving smarter, faster business decisions.

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