SOLIDATUS. DELIVERING SCALABLE, COLLABORATIVE DATA GOVERNANCE.
Solidatus leverages knowledge, expertise and automation to seamlessly integrate data governance into an organisation’s DNA – its people, its process and its data – significantly reducing the organisational disruption and time taken to implement a comprehensive data governance programme. It also provides effortless data capabilities to search for and find the intellectual property of the business to enable rapid delivery of a common understanding and control through either a business or IT lens. Solidatus goes beyond basic data governance by adding dimensions including data quality, privacy, permissions and regulations – powerfully visualised in context.
Data governance is about ensuring the right data gets to the right people at the right time, having demonstrable control over data quality and use, as well as achieving economies of scale and efficiencies through common understanding of data flows. While data management is about obtaining, processing, storing and distributing data, data governance aims to ensure the data is used properly.
Model: Data governance roles in data management
Solidatus utilises cutting edge technology and taking advantage of the best software engineering practise and methodologies to produce an industry leading, cloud-native and browser-optimised data governance platform. As the hub for an organisation’s metadata management, Solidatus and its API supports all operations programmatically. It integrates metadata updates from other systems and sources and takes advantage of its full version history change management functionality
DELIVERING THE FOUDATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DATA GOVERNANCE
Data Governance requires significant commitment. A proven approach is to start with a small number of strategic data flows, build on experience from these, and move towards automating as much as possible – while recognising that human intervention is required to validate, verify and add business meaning. High level sponsorship and SME buy-in is critical.
Though in some cases the penalties for lack of governance can drive the programme, from an investment perspective the advantages of a valuable, ‘live’ metadata asset are significant and also support the business case for governance. A highly productive platform assists in-demand SMEs to contribute their business knowledge efficiently and transparently. The emphasis must be on a sustainable process – the metadata to drive it can be kept up to date without a massive overhead, and there is flexibility to deal with new types of metadata as they become useful.
The sum of metadata for data governance is more valuable than its parts. For example, the combination of data quality and data lineage lets you see downstream and upstream impacts of problems. Combining data location with data privacy regulations and policies, lets you avoid problems with new privacy regulations and migrating to cloud datastores. Being able to do ‘what if’ studies of removing systems and seeing impacts through data lineage can make retiring old systems less risky.
Solidatus is designed to deliver early success and the foundation of sustainable data governance.
KEY BENEFITS
- FAST TO ACHIEVE RETURNS
Straightforward to understand, quick to import metadata and easy to integrate with other systems, reducing the time to get a data governance programme up and running. Combined with the flexibility of the Solidatus model and open API it is straightforward to adapt and add new metadata as it becomes available. - SCALE OUT TO SMEs
Metadata for a system can be owned and maintained by SMEs, and used as a reusable building block in data flows using the system. Built-in workflow for collaboration expands the scope of data governance to the experts. - CLARITY WITH FLEXIBILITY
Solidatus reference models – for business glossaries, data dictionaries, data catalogs and asset inventories – support organisation-wide definition and use of common business terms, policies, critical data elements, privacy policies and other data classification. Because reference models are fully integrated with data lineage metadata and the query language, they make analysis, search and focus on issues more powerful. They help users with different vocabularies find common meanings. - LINEAGE LUCIDITY
Solidatus provides industry-leading visualisation of lineage and the attendant metadata that informs and contextualises that lineage. With Solidatus, a company can record and distribute a complete understanding, from the most granular, field-level view up to the broadest overview of the journey data takes as it flows through the organisation.
DATA GOVERNANCE – THEORY AND PRACTICE
From our experience of implementing data governance programmes, practical issues can prevent significant progress and lead to a waste of money and resources. The most challenging aspects include:
- Extracting metadata for data lineage
- Maintaining data lineage as changes happen
- Being able to use business terms to find relevant data sources
- Scaling data governance over multiple data flows
- Adding metadata from disparate systems, like data quality scans, bespoke controls and reconciliations
- Visualising results, highlighting issues and impacts
Model: Building end-to-end flow using data lineage generated multiple systems
To be an effective and practical platform for data governance, Solidatus provides the tools to harvest metadata from systems with differing levels of ‘metadata maturity’ – from systems which provide their own attribute-level lineage, via systems where only structural metadata is available, to systems which are effectively a black box. Solidatus has capabilities to accelerate manual tasks, connectors and importers to pull in metadata, and the power to combine reusable building blocks of metadata into end-to-end flows.
Stale metadata is worse than useless, giving a false sense of security, so the ability to automatically harvest updates and to minimise the friction for manual updates is critical. However, this must be accompanied by control and audit. Solidatus tracks all revisions of metadata and the visual difference view clearly documents changes between any revisions.
Model: Metrics and revision information for metadata
Model: Visual differences view showing impact of changes
As most organisations have systems of varying ‘metadata maturity’, and since there are limits to what can be divined automatically, the role of subject matter experts (SMEs) is critical. SMEs understand the meaning of the data their systems process and can add their knowledge to the raw metadata. To scale out data governance to SMEs, Solidatus provides collaborative workflows and a highly productive User Interface (UI) based on our practical experience – including automated mapping and machine learning-enhanced relation suggestions.
Model: Using a business glossary to categorise information with relationship suggestions
Data quality metrics, privacy ratings, business meaning, regulation coverage, ownership, cloud versus on premises – all add to the value of the metadata asset. This extra value is multiplied by the ability to link and combine this data and see it in context – and to be able to add analysis and visualizations through a powerful (but easy to learn) query language that understands relationships, upstream and downstream flows and has access to any properties.
Model: Highlighting data quality issues and downstream impacts with display rules
Transparency and ease of access is a key factor for the success of a data governance programme – increasing the impact of the enriched metadata and opening up opportunities to find and use the right data. This is driven by ease of use, fast and powerful searches, clear navigation between metadata, and providing views which highlight particular aspects. Ownership and updates by the right people is made easy through a clear ownership model, built-in workflows and approvals, backed by the underlying change management implementation.
Model: Reference model updates and metrics dashboard
Organisations can benefit from practical, scalable data governance from a platform that is designed to eliminate the underlying obstacles that prevent them from addressing on-the-ground problems. Built from the ground up as a fully change managed, flexible metadata platform, organisations can quickly build out their key data flows, federate data stewardship and business knowledge to SMEs, and relate data to people and processes.
We have extensive experience in the full range of metadata management and data governance activities, gained in heavily regulated sectors like banking – where effective metadata management is obligatory.
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