From Knowledge Silos to Shared Data Understanding at Commerz Direktservice GmbH

Commerz Direktservice GmbH is a wholly owned subsidiary of Commerzbank AG, one of Germany’s leading banks for small and medium-sized enterprises. The company operates as a service center for Commerzbank, supporting customers through multiple channels including phone, email, bots, and online knowledge platforms.

Within the organization, the “Daten und Analysen” (Data and Analytics) team is responsible for delivering value from data end to end. The team manages everything from data sourcing and ETL development to data modeling and dashboarding for business users. It also plays a key role in enabling data transfers back to the parent company.

One of the biggest challenges Commerz Direktservice GmbH faced was the lack of a clear and centralized data governance approach. As a result, the organization was experiencing the following difficulties:

• Siloed knowledge – Knowledge about data was spread across teams, with no central place to document or access it, making it difficult to share and reuse.
• Process friction - The absence of precise technical documentation slowed down processes and the implementation of new projects.
• Development inefficiencies - Engineers struggled with complex data structures such as BigQuery nested fields. Combined with insufficient documentation, this increased development effort, as they first had to deconstruct the data at the source and make assumptions.
• Missed insights – Unclear data definitions and a decentralized understanding created a risk of overlooking valuable insights and unrealized potential.
• Audit & compliance risks - The lack of central documentation increased the risk of not fully meeting key audit requirements, which in a highly regulated environment can also lead to financial risks.

The team recognized that without a unified data governance approach, undocumented processes and unclear data structures would continue to grow over time. Given the fast-paced and evolving environment, addressing this early was essential for long-term sustainability.

Commerz Direktservice GmbH brought together all relevant stakeholders to define a better approach to data governance going forward. Since introducing new processes always requires additional effort, the team focused on keeping the barrier to entry as low as possible.

The team quickly agreed that a centralized solution was needed, rather than distributing data governance across multiple tools. The platform had to meet several key requirements:

• Centralized approach – A single solution instead of multiple decentralized tools.
• Business and technical coverage – Support for both business-friendly data descriptions and detailed technical documentation.
• System compatibility – Seamless integration with the existing system landscape.
• On-premise deployment – Required due to regulatory constraints and limitations around cloud usage in a subsidiary environment.
• Powerful data lineage capabilities – Clear and reliable visualization of data flows.

Several competing solutions were assessed, but many fell short due to limited connectors or insufficient data lineage representation.

Ultimately, Dataedo was chosen for its functionality, transparent pricing, and the sense of partnership the team felt during early interactions.

The implementation of Dataedo went smoothly, without major issues. The company’s administrators worked closely with the Dataedo technical team, ensuring a coordinated setup process. While minor challenges occurred during ongoing operations, they were quickly resolved thanks to fast and effective support.

The onboarding process was smooth, and the team felt well supported throughout, with the Dataedo team—especially Richard Monk—providing consistently strong and responsive support whenever needed.

One of the first key “aha moments” came with the generation of a data lineage diagram. It allowed the team to clearly visualize how complex the data ecosystem is and how different data flows are interconnected. This visual representation was automatically built from metadata extraction and provided immediate clarity and value.

Initially, Dataedo was used only within the core data team. Since the team was already data-oriented, there was little resistance, and the benefits of the tool were quickly recognized.

To enable broader adoption across the organization, the team took a structured approach:

• Stakeholder alignment – The topic was discussed with department heads to ensure organizational buy-in.
• Audit department support – Recommendations from the audit department were used as a key argument to secure approval and a formal “go-ahead” for rollout. The audit team supported the initiative as centralized documentation and end-to-end data traceability strengthened compliance readiness and reduced audit and regulatory risk.
• Positioning approach – The team focused on positioning Dataedo as an enabler rather than an additional workload, helping improve acceptance across the organization.

One of the key drivers of adoption was the use of logical grouping through “Subject areas,” which organize documentation around specific business contexts. This allowed the team to tailor information to each data consumer, focusing only on what was relevant and helping them build their processes faster and more effectively.

With Dataedo in place, Commerz Direktservice GmbH moved from siloed knowledge about data to a shared and structured understanding across the organization. Documentation became centralized, data flows more transparent, and collaboration between teams significantly improved.

• Unified data understanding - Dataedo enabled a consistent and accessible understanding of data across stakeholders. This helped break down silos and significantly increased transparency across the data landscape. Both technical and functional aspects of data could now be clearly documented in one place.
• Strengthened collaboration – Centralized documentation and a shared understanding of data improved collaboration between teams and reduced dependencies on individual knowledge.
• Improved analysis and decision-making – Better data documentation increased the quality of analyses and supported more reliable business decisions.
• Faster ETL development – Automated metadata extraction and clear visibility into data structures helped speed up the development of new ETL pipelines.
• Audit & compliance readiness - Custom classifications helped provide a precise overview of where privacy-relevant data is stored, while initial data quality checks supported validation of whether data is present in the expected form, strengthening overall compliance readiness.

As part of the next phase of development with Dataedo, the company plans to improve visibility for product owners into where their data is used and which reports it supports.

The organization also sees Dataedo as a foundation for future innovation initiatives, including AI-based reporting assistants that can automatically answer questions, summarize data, and understand context.

The team at Commerz Direktservice GmbH emphasizes that data documentation and governance can feel overwhelming at the beginning, especially when starting from scratch. However, they recommend taking the first steps early rather than postponing the initiative.

Early progress quickly leads to visible “aha moments” and creates long-term value for the organization, both in terms of efficiency and data understanding.