In order to successfully make data-driven decisions, an organization must at least know what the data is that they are working with, what it means, where it is coming from, if the data is complete and if it is trustworthy. Without data lineage, it is nearly impossible to decipher this information. As a result, many organizations invest in data lineage because it provides the full context surrounding an organization’s data and ensures that trustworthy data is being used to drive business decisions.
Benefits of data lineage
Data lineage can benefit the entire organization from IT to the business. It provides necessary visibility and context into an organization’s data, as well as frees up time for IT to focus on strategic initiatives instead of manually mapping data. These data lineage benefits enable organizations to
- Comply with regulations
- Better understand and trust their data
- Save time doing manual impact analysis
Comply with regulations
It is not easy to map data traceability for regulatory purposes, such as BCBS239, CCPA and GDPR. It can take countless hours, and if it is wrong, it can result in fines and penalties. Data lineage supports the Risk Management and Data Governance teams by tracking how data flows through various systems from source to destination and enabling risk management to view the audit trail for all data transformations.
Better understand and trust data
Data lineage benefits the business user by providing necessary context surrounding an organization’s data. Data lineage shows the full context of your data including the source of the data, how data sets are built and aggregated, the quality of data sets, and any transformations along the data journey. This helps ensure that accurate, complete and trustworthy data is being used to drive business decisions.
Save time doing manual impact analysis
Data lineage enables IT to conduct impact analysis at a granular level (columnar, table, or business report) so that they can see any changes to downstream systems when making a change in the data. This saves over 98% of IT’s time from doing manual analysis.
Why track data lineage for your organization?
Tracking data lineage is a crucial step in becoming a truly data intelligent organization. Large companies have data stored in 100s to 100,000s systems and in data sets that are strewn around the enterprise, including on premise, hosted and cloud. Adding to this, data continues to grow at exponential rates, making it even more difficult to trace where data is coming from and how it has transformed over time.
Data lineage benefits IT, as well as the business user, by providing an end to end visualization of where data is stored, where it came from, and where it is going. This visibility helps IT do their job quickly and effectively and helps give the business confidence in their data so that they can use it to make insightful business decisions.
See Collibra Data Lineage in action
Data lineage ensures that business analysts are using the most trusted data available and that they understand the context surrounding their data. Collibra Data Lineage takes standard data lineage tools one step further by automating data mapping. Without automated lineage, IT may spend countless hours manually mapping lineage. But with Collibra Data Lineage, IT no longer needs to manually create lineage diagrams and instead can let the tool automatically extract lineage from various source systems and keep it up to date, which helps IT by saving about 95% of their time. This frees up resources and allows IT to focus on strategic initiatives. Furthermore, Collibra Data Lineage helps with a number of use cases, such as
- Regulatory compliance
- Self-service analytics
- Data exploration and viability
- Rationalization and cloud migration
- Asset management
- Impact analysis
Ultimately, Collibra Data Lineage automates the creation of data lineage and provides a visualization of business and technical lineage from data source to report. Furthermore, data lineage benefits the entire organization. It enables the business to gain a better understanding of their data so they can use this data to make informed business decisions, while simultaneously helping IT do their job more effectively and efficiently so they can spend more time on strategic initiatives.
