Defining data catalog
A data catalog creates and maintains an inventory of an organization’s data assets across its entire digital landscape. If we expound on this data catalog definition it enables data professionals to discover, understand, trust and manage their data by leveraging metadata. Metadata provides information such as the format and structure of the data, when and how assets were created, and business context about the data. The overarching role of an enterprise data catalog is to utilize all of this metadata to make data assets easier to find, use, and trust to drive more insightful business decisions.
How does a data catalog work?
Like a library catalog which provides a central location for you to easily look up the description, location and availability of all books in a library, a data catalog provides a comprehensive view of data across your organization. It serves as an inventory of data assets with a powerful search function that enables you to easily locate and access your data.
Similar to a book description in a library catalog, a data catalog provides business context around your data. This helps you know what data is available across the organization so you can use the right data to make impactful business decisions. As a result, many organizations are placing data catalogs at the center of their metadata management strategies. They are using these catalogs to drive innovation, growth, and insightful business decisions.
But not all organizations have moved to implementing a data catalog. Many struggle to effectively and efficiently unlock the value of their data.
“90% of respondents see data as a high priority in decision making, but 47% struggle with a lack of efficiency when using data and 42% deal with poor quality data.”
-Leverage your data, BARC
These organizations may wonder, why do I need a data catalog? How would I use it? What are the business benefits?
This blog helps answer these questions. It illustrates the must-have capabilities of a data catalog so you can be sure you are getting the right catalog for your needs.
Why do I need a data catalog?
Most organizations see data as crucial to their business strategy. According to a survey conducted by Forrester, 84% of respondents see data as central to generating accurate business decisions. But without a data catalog many organizations struggle to be data driven because their data is siloed across the organization.
In fact, business analysts spend 76% of their time finding, understanding and accessing data, instead of using data to generate insights. This time wasted can slow down analyses and ultimately innovation. To solve this problem, organizations must turn to a data catalog to help them…
- Gain a unified view of all their data
- Spend less time hunting for data and more time analyzing data
- Improve trust and confidence in their data
- Increase productivity and operational efficiency
- Accelerate time to insight
The ability to trust your data allows you to truly unlock the value of your data and generate meaningful, trusted business insights. It enables business users to spend less time searching for data and more time creating analyses. This ultimately speeds up time to insight. It allows your organization to adapt to the trends of the market as they occur and spend more time innovating.
What are data catalog tools and solutions
Not all data catalogs are created equally. It is important to know what capabilities to look for when selecting a data catalog. Some data catalog solutions are tactical and are built for IT and data engineers, not the business. These siloed solutions cannot be successfully deployed across an enterprise, and therefore, do not support data democratization. These solutions are only for the technical user and are not helpful to the entire business.
In contrast, strategically deployed data catalogs can catalog data sources across the entire enterprise. These robust solutions help the whole company, not just IT.
A data catalog solution with broad metadata connectivity connects and ingests metadata from across the company. It ingests data from databases, data lakes, warehouses, enterprise applications, ETL tools and BI solutions. This ensures that your data catalog is the one-stop-shop for discovering data.
Take back control of your data landscape
Robust data catalogs help organizations take back control of their data landscape by providing native, automated data lineage. Data lineage helps data users better understand their data by providing additional context. It shows where the data comes from, how the data transforms, and how it is used.
A data catalog solution with embedded data governance and data privacy is also crucial. Data governance and privacy enforce policies that control user access so you know that only the right people are using your data. This ensures that your data is accurate, consistent, complete and discoverable.
What’s the right data catalog software
An enterprise-grade data catalog ensures that business analysts, data scientists, data engineers, marketing, IT, HR and the rest of the company can unlock the value of their data through an easy-to-use data shopping experience. This allows data consumers to quickly and easily shop for and check out data sets through an eCommerce-like shopping experience.
On top of the data shopping feature, it is important to have a machine learning powered solution. ML-powered data catalog software saves time and increases productivity by automating manual tasks. It automates sorting, classifying and organizing data assets. It also enriches data in the catalog by adding business context at scale.
Finally, collaboration is a key capability of any enterprise data catalog software. Collaboration capabilities break down organizational silos and enable the sharing of data, knowledge and insights across an organization.
This helps improve data transparency for every user. With a data catalog, everyone across the company can access a centralized, enterprise-wide repository of assets. This ensures a common understanding of the data and helps everyone easily discover relevant data to do their job.
Getting the most from your data catalog
With an enterprise data catalog you can deploy your data catalog across your organization. This helps you avoid data silos and empowers business users to easily discover and access trusted data. This increases productivity and helps drive business value by enabling the business to make accurate and impactful data-driven decisions.
More specifically, your data catalog can be used in a number of different use cases. An organization can use a data catalog to…
- Enable self-service analytics for the business user
- Get more value from your data and analytics investments, such as data lakes and BI tools
- Accelerate your move to the cloud
- Ensure regulatory compliance
Delivering end-to-end visibility and providing access to trusted data across your organization starts with your data catalog. Come take a tour of the Collibra Data Catalog to learn how the right data catalog can put your business on course in its journey to achieving Data Intelligence.
