The General Organization for Social Insurance (GOSI), as a government entity, was established in 2001 in Saudi Arabia to implement the provisions of social insurance law to achieve compulsory insurance coverage, collecting contributions from employers and paying benefits for eligible contributors and family members. GOSI maintains administrative and financial independence under the supervision of a 11-member board of directors. The organization carries out its activities through the head office and 21 field offices located in a number of regions and governorates in the kingdom.
A 360-Degree View
GOSI was a structurally siloed organization with various departments relying on disjointed legacy systems and manual data processing. The organization maintained multiple data sources including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, external APIs, social media data, flat files, and CSV files. Extracting data from these siloed systems to build a central data repository using traditional approaches, such as extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes, was extremely complicated, expensive, and time-consuming. With ETL limitations, GOSI found it extremely difficult to get real-time customer data for analytics and enforce data security. Also, whenever there was a change in the source environment, the ETL scripts needed to be rewritten or modified, a cumbersome undertaking overall.
GOSI leveraged the Denodo Platform to create a logical semantic data access layer that gathers data from all the data sources and makes it available to consuming applications, taking care of all the heavy lifting and data transformation. Because the Denodo Platform is a unified data access layer, it also facilitates the implementation of centralized governance, security, and on-the-fly data masking. GOSI also leverages the Denodo Platform to create services that are used by other government institutions.