Why Your Business Needs an Enterprise Data Catalog

Imagine trying to find a specific book in a massive library without any cataloging system. You’d spend countless hours searching, likely without success. Now, think of your business data as that library. Without a well-organized, accessible, and easily searchable system, leveraging your data’s full potential becomes nearly impossible. An enterprise data catalog transforms this overwhelming task into a streamlined, efficient process, ensuring that the right data is always at your fingertips.

For data analysts, data scientists, and leaders in data, the challenge lies not in the quantity of data available but in efficiently discovering, accessing, and utilizing this data to generate insights. In fact, a report from McKinsey found that employees spend on average 1.8 hours each day searching for and gathering information. A further report from IDC found that the knowledge worker spends roughly 30% of their workday searching for information. 

This is where an enterprise data catalog becomes indispensable. An enterprise data catalog enhances productivity, accelerates time to insight, and democratizes data access, among other benefits. Let’s explore why your business needs an enterprise data catalog and how it can transform your data operations.

Boosting data analyst productivity

Data analysts are at the forefront of generating insights from data. However, their productivity is often hampered by the time-consuming tasks of searching for the right data, understanding its context, and ensuring its accuracy. An enterprise data catalog streamlines these processes by providing a centralized repository of all data assets within an organization.

With a centralized data access point, an enterprise data catalog consolidates data from various sources, making it easily accessible from a single platform. This eliminates the need for data analysts to navigate multiple systems to find the necessary data. Enhanced data discovery with powerful search and filtering capabilities allows data analysts to quickly find relevant data, significantly reducing the time spent on data discovery.

A data catalog provides comprehensive data context by offering detailed metadata, including data lineage, data quality metrics, and usage history. This context helps data analysts understand the data's origin, transformation, and reliability, enabling more accurate analysis. Data catalogs facilitate collaboration and sharing, allowing analysts to annotate data assets, share queries, and document insights. This shared knowledge repository enhances team productivity and fosters a culture of collaboration.

Accelerating time to insight

In the competitive business landscape, speed is of the essence. The faster organizations can turn data into actionable insights, the better their chances of making informed decisions and staying ahead of the competition. An enterprise data catalog plays a crucial role in accelerating time to insight.

By consolidating and integrating data from disparate sources, analysts can access a holistic view of the data without spending time on manual integration efforts. Predefined data relationships in data catalogs help analysts quickly identify relevant datasets and perform comprehensive analyses without starting from scratch.

Reusable data pipelines stored in a data catalog allow analysts to leverage pre-built assets to expedite their analysis, reducing the time required to prepare and process data. Automated data profiling features assess data quality and consistency, allowing analysts to quickly identify anomalies and address data quality issues, ensuring faster and more reliable insights.

Time saved for the IT team via search and discovery

The IT team is often burdened with ad hoc data requests from various departments. This can be a significant drain on their resources and time. An enterprise data catalog alleviates this burden by empowering users with self-service capabilities.

Self-service data access allows business users to independently search for and access the data they need, reducing their reliance on the IT team for data retrieval and fostering a culture of data self-sufficiency. Data catalogs enforce data governance policies, ensuring users access data in compliance with organizational standards and regulations. This reduces the IT team’s data governance and security oversight workload.

A data catalog helps deliver efficient data request management by providing a platform for managing data requests and approvals. This streamlines the process and ensures that data requests are handled efficiently, freeing up the IT team’s time for more strategic tasks. By providing rich metadata, data catalogs help users understand the structure and context of the data, reducing the need for IT intervention in explaining data nuances and allowing the IT team to focus on maintaining and optimizing the data infrastructure.

The value of query sharing

Sharing queries and analyses can significantly enhance productivity and innovation in a collaborative data environment. An enterprise data catalog with an intelligent SQL editor ensures that queries can be shared safely between individuals and teams with the appropriate governance and oversight. This significantly benefits a company’s data culture through improved data literacy. 

Knowledge sharing is promoted as data analysts and scientists can share their queries and analyses with peers, reducing duplication of effort and leading to more efficient and effective data utilization. Standardized reporting is achieved by sharing standardized queries, ensuring consistency in reporting and analysis, reducing discrepancies, and enhancing the reliability of insights across different teams and departments.

Accelerated problem-solving occurs when analysts share their queries, allowing others to build upon them and expedite the problem-solving process, even if they are non-technical users. This collaborative effort can lead to faster and more innovative solutions to business challenges. Learning and development are fostered through query sharing, providing junior analysts with the opportunity to learn from the work of their more experienced colleagues. This fosters a culture of continuous learning and professional development within the organization.

Data democratization and levels of trust in analysis

Data democratization is about making data accessible (with the appropriate safeguards) to all users within an organization, regardless of their technical expertise. An enterprise data catalog can be a powerful enabler of data democratization, which in turn enhances trust in analysis.

Alation’s data catalog provides accessible data for all through a user-friendly interface that allows non-technical users to discover and access data. This democratization of data ensures that everyone in the organization can leverage data for decision-making. Enhanced data literacy is achieved by providing detailed metadata and data documentation, helping users understand the data they are working with, and empowering users to perform their analyses confidently.

Data catalogs can also provide increased transparency into data lineage and transformation processes, building trust in the data as users can see where the data comes from, how it has been processed, and how reliable it is. When data is democratized, and users have access to the same data sources and documentation, consistent and reliable insights are generated. This consistency cultivates trust in the analysis and ensures that data-driven decisions are based on accurate and reliable information.

Use case: how Discover uses a data catalog to drive business results

Discover Financial Services, a leading financial institution, has successfully deployed an enterprise data catalog, leading to significant business outcomes. Providing data to data scientists and analysts for model creation involved a stringent, labor-intensive process of building ETL pipelines, which could take up to 30 days. Discover's data engineers had to curate metadata, locate, profile, and establish quality control measures on the data before creating and executing a pipeline to deliver data to internal users.

“We wanted to cut the pipeline creation timeline from 30 days to one or two days,” said Prakash Jaganathan, Sr. Director, Enterprise Data Platforms, Discover Financial Services. “The only way we could do that was to automate and power those data pipelines using active metadata.”

Faced with managing vast amounts of data across multiple systems, Discover turned to Alation’s data catalog to enhance data accessibility, governance, and overall data usage.

Implementing Alation’s platform enabled Discover to create a centralized repository of its data assets, improving data discoverability and allowing users across the organization to quickly find and access the data they needed. Robust features like data lineage tracking and metadata management improved data governance, ensuring data was used in compliance with regulatory standards and internal policies, reducing risks, and enhancing data security.

Discover empowered its data users by providing self-service access to the data catalog, reducing reliance on the IT team for data requests, and enabling users to explore and utilize data for their analyses independently. With a comprehensive view of their data and enhanced data context provided by the catalog, Discover was able to accelerate the generation of insights, leading to faster and more informed decision-making across the organization.

By democratizing data access and enhancing data literacy, Discover has fostered a data-driven culture. Today, more than 2,500 users across the global workforce employ Alation to find, use, and enrich the metadata in a million-plus cataloged tables. The productivity gains and faster time to insights lead to more time for innovation – and in Discover’s case, that equates to 200,000 hours saved.

Conclusion

An enterprise data catalog is a mission-critical part of the modern data stack for organizations aiming to harness the full potential of their data. For data analysts, data scientists, and data leaders, a data catalog enhances productivity, accelerates time to insight, saves valuable IT resources, and promotes data democratization and trust in analysis. The benefits extend beyond operational efficiency to foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and data-driven decision-making.

Discover Financial Services’ experience exemplifies the transformative power of a data catalog. By improving data discoverability, governance, and user empowerment, Discover was able to unlock significant business value and drive strategic outcomes.

Investing in an enterprise data catalog is a strategic move that can propel your organization toward greater data maturity and competitive advantage. By centralizing data access, enhancing data quality and governance, and fostering a collaborative data culture, a data catalog enables organizations to make smarter, faster, and more informed decisions.

So, why wait? Start your journey towards better data management and utilization with an enterprise data catalog today. Schedule a demo with us to get started.