How Alation Document Hubs Helps Your Organization “Speak Data”

We are thrilled to announce that Document Hubs, our innovative documentation feature set, has been released. This new feature allows organizations to create customized documentation objects tailored to their needs, whether for a business glossary, business applications, or metrics and KPIs. Leaders can create multiple “hubs” for various business reasons, from application inventories to AI and data products. This enables a shared data language that makes sense for the company.

For newcomers seeking simple answers about data, modern data systems, which are often siloed and disconnected, offer little in the way of definitive answers.

Nowadays, almost everyone needs to understand data to do their job, but most organizations struggle to make data use simple. Employees must exert tremendous time and energy to acquire the knowledge they need to succeed. Colleagues discuss acronyms and metrics daily, but knowing where to find their definitions is difficult. Definitions that shift by department make it impossible to have a shared understanding. 

In this realm, organizations must be able to:

• Speak the same data language

• Increase interactions and knowledge sharing between IT and the business

• Make data use simple

In this blog, we’ll uncover the role of Document Hubs in achieving these objectives.

Speak the same data language

Establishing a common language around data allows people in your organization to communicate about data effectively. With Document Hubs, data leaders can align definitions of terms such as “spend amount” so that everyone understands how this term is calculated and used.  

Business glossary terms define company metrics and acronyms, helping everyone across departments understand and speak in the same relatable data language. Reviews and workflow approvals can help resolve conflicts for critical glossary items when discrepancies exist in an item’s definition. Moreover, understanding where the terms apply in data assets such as business intelligence dashboards provides helpful context. 

As new use cases arise, businesses need the freedom to templatize critical types of information, from AI model cards to data products. With Document Hubs, users can create document templates tailored to what the item represents rather than using a generic, one-size-fits-all approach. Custom fields can be added to capture business-specific details, making the documents more relevant and valuable for your organization. Critically, these docs are searchable, so people can utilize a broad range of information about a given topic.

Customize templates specific to your organization's use case.

How can businesses introduce new hires to their unique data language? With Document Hubs, leaders can make critical onboarding information readily available. Having such details in your data intelligence platform promotes self-service, saving time, eliminating frustration, and making employees more successful. 

Increase interactions and knowledge sharing between IT and the business

Document Hubs increase interactions between IT and business users, helping to remove tribal knowledge barriers and creating a synergy between these groups. For example, having high-level project plan information in the Alation Data Intelligence Platform for essential business initiatives like data modernization provides better collaboration between technical and business teams. 

With this feature, leaders can provide one place with critical data assets and links to technical and business metadata. When questions arise as the project progresses, this centrality makes it easy for people to find answers. It also leads to more impactful conversations about current status, roadblocks, and next steps.

Document Hubs can also map business processes to applications and data. This application hub serves many purposes inside the organization.  For example, data warehouses often integrate application data from multiple sources. Having this knowledge in one place helps enhance change planning, lowers the risk of business outages, and promotes better IT and business collaboration.

Visibility and transparency are essential for building trust, especially regarding new AI initiatives. Business stakeholders frequently perceive AI as a "black box," generating recommendations without clear explanations, which can lead to uncertainty. Document Hubs help address this through model card documents. These documents offer transparency into how AI models function, increasing understanding and reducing uncertainty, building trust in AI-driven initiatives.

Make data use simple

To increase data decision-making, companies must provide helpful context so people can understand data efficiently. Personalization of content is a great way to quickly direct users to data assets critical to the business. The Alation Data Intelligence Platform allows the customization of the home page, providing the ability to get information by role, domain, and other categories. For example, you can customize your homepage to show the pertinent data products described in your organization’s data language so users can make informed decisions about their use.

For example, the Burns & McDonnell data management team has customized its homepage to surface its Document Hubs. Nested folders point people to the most high-value information about data, helping them use the catalog effectively: 

Working from more than 75 offices worldwide, Burns & McDonnell designs and builds critical infrastructure. Their family of companies (driven by engineers, construction professionals, architects, planners, technologists, and scientists), delivers projects grounded in safety and a desire to make a difference as they make their clients successful. To this end, their customized homepage gives key data users valuable context to support their success.

Organizations can streamline the path from data discovery to business decision-making by building comprehensive documents. For instance, consider customer segmentation. Instead of relying on simple descriptions, organizations can use Document Hubs to create one resource that includes detailed information about the business use, critical reporting assets, and related resources, all in one place. This consolidated document becomes a valuable tool for sharing knowledge and guiding users to the relevant data, making it easier for them to glean insights effectively.

Conclusion 

Our goal at Alation is to create an easier path for users to move from uncertainty to effective business decisions with data. With this new feature, leaders can do just that, establishing a common knowledge semantic layer that allows people to communicate about data effectively. Now, you can show the relationships between critical terms, metrics, applications, and business processes to data to increase understanding. You can translate complex technical details into a context that every role in the organization can consume. And you can empower people not to feel like it is their first day of work every day.

Go beyond having just README text files to a world of enabling knowledge for everyone about data!

To learn more about Document Hubs in Alation:

• Read the press release

• View all of the details in the Release Notes

• Get a demo