How Data Lineage Helps our Customers Trust the Data Used in Reports and Strategic Decisions
Decision makers in executive board rooms make key strategic decisions that affect employees, customers, partners, shareholders and the wider market. These decisions are often based on data and reports that give the facts from which to make decisions. But how do they know the information is factual and correct? There are of course various influencing contributors, but one key to verifying and trusting these, is advanced data lineage.
Advanced data lineage distinguishes itself from a more basic form, that is often created manually or is part of another system, such as a catalog. Advanced data lineage has been built specifically for the complex needs of large organizations with expansive amounts of data. It enables companies to see where data enters the business, where it flows, how it transforms and other key information about the data that impacts the business – such as the changes data went through because of formulas or currency rates, or where data quality issues are showing up.
So how do businesses use it to support these decisions and the many reports created across the organization? We spoke to our customers and asked them.
Our customers want to have confidence in knowing where exactly data is sourced from, where it flows – and to trust it. They want to know the data is accurate for business decision making, analytics, policy reports and regulatory reports. As a customer explained, they want to quickly know where the data comes from for annual reports and verify any discrepancies or questions, improving accuracy. Advanced data lineage from Solidatus enables this.
From a regulatory perspective, customers often want to be able to show regulators how data flows looked in the past and how they’ve improved it. They can do this using bi-temporal version control, that takes a snapshot of historic instances and shows how it looked for example a year ago, versus now. Our customers can also demonstrate how they expect it to look in the future.
Our customers like being able to know where data comes from that is used in annual (and other) reports. And to be able to quickly verify or resolve any issues, so that tight deadlines can be met and work continues. The reports are often part of a larger marketing initiative, to create the annual report for shareholders and the public – and they don’t want to hold things up.
If issues arise, they want to be able to do root cause analysis and trace back from the report, all the way through systems and calculations, to its source – or to the point where a discrepancy occurred. Solidatus advanced data lineage lets them do this through a visual map, that interactively lets them trace back and see highlighted in red for quick visibility, where there is a data quality issue. It also shows them who is the system owner, so they can rapidly get in touch to resolve the issue.
As one customer explained about the back-end process, in order to create reports and dashboards, they need to align what they want to know, with the corresponding column header in the data lake – and whether the term used in the data lake is the same as that used in the corresponding system. This helps them find the data.
An example might be one system using the term ‘sales revenue’, but the other uses ‘income’. If you can’t see that difference, you won’t understand why there is an issue creating the report and extracting the right information. As our customer explained, “You have to connect the dashboard to that column header, so you must know where it is, what it’s called and who the system owner is, so you can contact them. All of this is visible in Solidatus.”
Once you have advanced data lineage in place, you can use it for many different use cases. Find out more about Solidatus for reporting and decision making – as well as for for AI, operational resilience, change management, regulatory compliance and more.
Published on: June 23, 2025
