Power up your data visibility

Ask yourself this question: How much time do you spend finding the right data everytime you want to do an analysis? 

My guess is too much time. All your colleagues, business analysts and data scientists that are using data probably have the same problem. At the end of the month, hundreds of hours are wasted on tasks with no real business value. We can fix that.

With the constant increase of data either generated or acquired by companies, we have invested massive amounts of resources to build modern and high performing data analytical platforms. And yet, making full use of the value accumulated in these environments still remains the real challenge. Usually, only a handful of people will have the global overview of what is available and you can’t expect them to support all the data citizens across the company.

This is why data visibility is crucial to any business that wants to have a strong data driven strategy. 

Having a clear and constantly updated map of all the data assets available across the company is key to speeding up business decisions and avoiding wasting precious time. Data catalogs such as Sidecar are there for this purpose, so you can quickly gain visibility. Data catalogs automatically capture detailed metadata from disparate information systems and organize them, apply tags and classifications to support the needs of the organization. 

Having more visibility means more benefits will emerge:

Conduct analysis with greater confidence:
Business metadata will give meaningful contextualization. Knowing the rules and transformations that have been applied during the life cycle of the datasets will help data interpretation.

Use data cross-business units:
By knowing what is available, teams can easily share and use data from other sectors and break the organizational silos.

Enhance risk identification:
Easily locate sensitive data that needs to be safeguarded and take the appropriate measures to reduce data leakage.

Identify and reduce duplicated data sets:
Avoid redundant data pipeline development, save storage and infrastructure resources.

Streamline data definitions:
Add proper and consistent definitions to exposed data assets and reduce the impact of misunderstandings.

Improve data management strategy:
The Chief Data Officer’s team can better understand the data assets available enterprise-wide and take actions to improve governance and asset utilization.

The key issue, too often, is not having the data itself, but not having proper visibility into the data. Decentralized, siloted and unshared data are wasted resources. To obtain crucial buy-ins from the data consumers, a data catalog is now essential for any business.