In data-driven organizations, how team members build, manage and leverage their data catalog will make or break their analytical initiatives. If a business user can easily search their data catalog, discover valuable data, uncover its business meaning, understand how data is linked to business processes and easily read its data quality score, they can quickly achieve the required data intelligence.
However, traditional data catalogs don’t include comprehensive business knowledge. Instead, they focus on technical data lineage, documenting only the data’s location and technical meaning. Yet, technical data lineage is only a singular view of data lineage.
Technical data lineage tracks where sensitive data elements reside, how they change and who has access. All this information is critical to establishing regulatory compliance, but it does little to help users develop meaningful business insights.
Instead, enterprises must track data lineage from multiple perspectives. While technical lineage is critical to some users, there’s also business lineage and automated data lineage, providing additional data perspectives.
Incorporating Business Data Lineage into Your Data Catalog
To be successful, business users need clarity into data definitions, synonyms, business attributes and usage to develop quality data intelligence. As a result, a data catalog must enable business users to understand and leverage data as an asset.
By tracking data lineage to understand data’s origins and transformations, businesses provide an audit trail throughout the data’s lifecycle. This information helps business users verify the source, and thus trustworthiness, of information.
While trustworthy data is a critical characteristic, almost as important is making sure that data is consumable by all users. Users want to understand their data from a business context perspective to develop reliable analytical outcomes.
Business lineage tracks data to ensure business users have accurate information that produces real, actional business knowledge within context. It provides users with a clear understanding of the flow and characteristics of their data. As a result, they can identify crucial business process relationships, empowering users to determine any business meaning associated with data.
By also including data quality scores and metrics, data access methods and usage restrictions, the data catalog accelerates productivity, reduces costs and improves collaboration among technical and business users. However, building a data catalog requires an inclusive approach that incorporates everyone across the enterprise.
How to Build a Business-Ready Data Catalog
A business-ready data catalog brings together all the organization’s data knowledge, business processes, goals, objectives and metrics, into a single environment for teams to use. This knowledge, when connected, allows users to understand, trust and get value from their data regardless of their data expertise.
Therefore, business users must take an active role in building the business-ready data catalog through an enterprise data governance framework. By assigning data ownership and encouraging participation among multiple lines of business, companies collect and then document organizationally dispersed technical and business knowledge.
Collaboratively developing a data catalog with technical and business data lineage empowers all data users to utilize the catalog. While automation and 3D Data Lineage advances the data catalog to the next level.
Automation & 3D Data Lineage
Integrating automated metadata and lineage ingestion into the data catalog, allows organizations to automatically profile and discover data patterns and descriptors. 3D Lineage provides business users data visualization across all data, systems and processes.
With 3D Lineage, users can easily attach data assets to a wide array of business processes and use cases, establishing specific business context around each data set.
Ultimately, 3D data lineage provides data leaders with a comprehensive data catalog that acts as a critical tool to make more informed data decisions and improve business operations.
With an easily accessible, searchable and trustworthy business-ready data catalog, organizations provide a comprehensive, single source of data knowledge across all data siloes and data systems. This allows business users to immediately derive value from data assets with absolute confidence.