Governing your data

Data governance is about ensuring the right data reaches 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.

Delivering the foundation 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 recognizing that human intervention is required to validate, verify and add business meaning. High level sponsorship and subject matter expert buy-in is critical.

Though in some cases the penalties for lack of governance can drive the program, 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 experts in contributing 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.

Effective, practical, sustainable 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.

As most organizations have systems of varying ‘metadata maturity’, and since there are limits to what can be divined automatically, the role of SMEs is critical. They 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.

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.

Transparency and ease of access is a key factor for the success of a data governance program – 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.

Organizations 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, organizations 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.

Why Solidatus?

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