We at Collibra are very pleased to be a part of the Gartner Market Guide for Information Stewardship Applications. Information stewardship is the foundation of everything the Chief Data Officer (CDO) needs to accomplish. It is also the primary focus of each of us here at Collibra. Without an active and engaged community of data stewards, no CDO can succeed.
We feel our vision of this market aligns well with Gartner’s vision. We believe that organizations need automation for their CDO office, and that automation platforms have several significant requirements:
- They must integrate the information from across the organization; from existing applications, and data marts, to warehouse, and reporting systems
- They must ensure consistency of critical policies and processes while allowing for necessary variation
- They must have variations for different domains within the organization, so users are working in context
- They must be able to link across the (usually siloed) parts of the organization
Collibra also believes that the only way to achieve these goals is with a common platform that is easy and accessible to all information stewards however they choose to use it. The platform must be flexible to handle all organizational models and data capabilities with configuration. It also must come with pre-built configurations to get users up and running quickly. Without this platform, you do not have visibility into your information, you cannot manage its quality and risks, and you cannot expand its use and value. In short, you cannot use data to improve your business.
As organizations begin building an information stewardship capability, they often focus on only a few use cases. But without covering the full range of use cases, the CDO office will struggle, as highly visible elements of its mission will be left unfulfilled. The organization will be exposed to significant risks, and will lose opportunities. They need an easy-to-use, flexible, comprehensive platform like Collibra Data Governance Center. It covers all the capabilities needed by information stewards, and is flexible to deploy in any organization.
Gartner defined the set of capabilities that information stewards need. They include:
- The information model
- Data quality monitoring and profiling
- Business glossary
- Analytics support
- Workflow and exception management
- Business rules and policy management
- Playbooks and preloaded templates
- Audit and organizational memory
We feel each of these capabilities is required to create a complete stewardship solution. Missing capabilities represent not only lost opportunity, but also significant risks for the organization. If any one of these capabilities is missing, that will erode trust and confidence in the data. Users will be unable to find, use, and improve the data.
There are other factors that make information stewardship solutions more or less useful. We believe Gartner points out a major difference between standalone information stewardship applications and those that are features of some other application. The features may be enough for a particular use case, yet their focus on other activities and other types of users makes them different from purpose-built solutions such as Collibra. These features cannot match the breadth and integration of the purpose-built solutions.
Even the breadth and depth of a complete purpose-built application is not always enough. After all, information stewards (mostly) have other jobs. The reason they know so much about the data is that they use it to do those other jobs. They need to be able to perform their stewardship tasks quickly and easily. Besides, anyone who uses the data needs to have some stewardship capabilities available to them. The business glossary and data catalog should be available to anyone, as should the data helpdesk. This creates a challenge for those vendors whose information stewardship capabilities are part of another product. Their application will be designed for a different audience. Stewardship involves many people from all parts of the organization. They have different levels of expertise in the data and different levels of investment in the processes for taking care of that data. The solution must be specifically organized to cater to these diverse groups.
We believe that the future of data governance will bring extensions and expansions to this platform. New sets of applications will emerge alongside the information stewardship applications. Ultimately, stewardship will be a the “anchor tenant” of a platform that serves those responsible for information. Information stewardship applications will be the equivalent of ERP for your data organization. In fact, our CEO, Felix Van de Maele, made a prediction at our recent Collibra Data Citizens Conference: “Like a CFO has SAP or a CRO has Salesforce, the CDO will have Collibra.”
Gartner, Market Guide for Information Stewardship Applications, Guido De Simoni | Andrew White | Ankush Jain, 15 April 2016
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