Alation Business Lineage: Making Lineage Accessible to Everyone

Today, data lineage is crucial for every data user in an organization. It provides visibility into data flows, helping users trust their data for critical business initiatives, compliance, and self-service products. Both business stakeholders and technical engineers need to collaborate on data products, and business lineage enables effective teamwork.

Traditionally, data lineage has helped technical users like data engineers track how data moves through pipelines, identify transformations, and resolve issues quickly. However, for business users, technical lineage often feels inaccessible. Understanding where data originates, such as the source of a metric in a BI dashboard, can be difficult without technical expertise, leading to confusion or reliance on technical teams.

To solve this problem, Alation has released Business Lineage, which enhances collaboration for cross-team data projects by making it easier to comprehend complex data flows. Business Lineage is the only experience that automatically groups, summarizes, and overlays relevant metadata across sources for business and technical users. This new offering levels the playing field, making lineage less complex and more productive, allowing insights to be achieved faster.

A Context Problem

The Alation Data Intelligence Platform is built for everyone, from business to technical users. However, unlike their technical colleagues, business users found it difficult to work with data lineage. For them, lineage is like a foreign language, which makes it challenging to interpret. This was due to technical names for data assets, noisy data flows, lack of automatic grouping in systems like Snowflake and Tableau, and complex visualizations that were hard to navigate.

This resulted in business and technical users spending too much time matching relevant catalog metadata for business insights with the technical lineage chart, which caused project delays. Ultimately, the lineage information lacked the business context to make it a viable solution for business and technical users. 

To address this challenge, Alation worked closely with 65+ customers to understand their pain in effectively deciphering complex data flows. Their input was critical to creating a business lineage solution that helps organizations streamline data analysis, increase trust through transparency, and improve data governance.

Streamline Data Analysis

How does Business Lineage help business users? Take Jane, for instance, who is a business analyst. One day, the sales department manager, Joe, asks Jane whether the total spend amount was correctly calculated on the Transactions Overview dashboard in Tableau. First, she checks the definition of that metric in the business glossary to understand its meaning and calculation. Her next step would be to trace the data lineage from the report to the source systems to see the data the report uses.

Jane recalls that this was a painful question in the past, causing her to open an IT ticket, which took time to get an answer. She simply could not decipher the map below, which had so many objects and technical titles that didn’t make any sense:

With the new Business Lineage offering, the compound layout provides the following benefits and the functionality to make deciphering a data lineage map easier, which drives faster data discovery, insights, and fluency:

Now, Jane can simplify the lineage to show where the data flows from the relevant sources (in this case, Snowflake and Tableau):

She can even filter this view further to remove temporary objects and the business rather than the technical titles, bringing clarity to tracing the source Snowflake data to the Tableau dashboard:

The final view shows that Jane can now find the source tables independently without needing IT to look this up for her, saving many hours. In addition, it is straightforward for Jane to show Joe how to do this himself, further streamlining data analysis for other business users. Jane is also excited to collaborate with IT on upcoming projects now that she understands data lineage better:

Increase Trust Through Transparency

Trusting data requires transparency into its quality and peer validation as delivered through endorsements or deprecations. Technical users enhance Alation Business Lineage through data quality rules that automatically surface data health and trust indicators on the data assets from source inception to business user consumption. Having this information inside the data lineage increases trust.

Jane often uses Google Maps to look at traffic information that could affect her route. Knowing about any potential changes due to construction or traffic volume ahead of time can help Jane change her route and save time.

Similarly, Alation Business Lineage provides a "birds-eye view" of data flows, enabling users to grasp the whole picture and adjust their behavior accordingly. The metadata layers operate the same way, allowing users to seamlessly review potential issues with data that affect their data journey downstream. This becomes visible when choosing the metadata overlay option for deprecation:

Upon reviewing the data flow, Jane discovers that an old legacy source is no longer being used, which ensures no old data is feeding the Transactions Overview dashboard. Business lineage has helped to build confidence in the data, but one more item to review is data health.

Having data quality information in data lineage allows business users to understand any issues and potential downstream impacts on reports or dashboards. Jane reviews the summary information after seeing the data quality alert. Based on the alert, Jane can go to the table and visit the data health tab to see if any of the relevant data elements are impacted.

Improve Data Governance 

Business lineage provides the means to understand how sensitive data moves throughout the organization. Informational icons appear in the data flow, indicating the presence of key information, such as sensitive data. With informational overlays, business users can see policy information about the sensitive data asset and be guided on how to treat the data for compliant use.

Conclusion

Alation is the data intelligence platform for everybody. This is a key commitment in delivering functionality such as business lineage. Jon Ulloa is the Principal Product Manager of data lineage at Alation and helped lead the creation of business lineage. Jon explains the importance of data lineage by stating, “Lineage is the foundation for discovering relationships between data, people, and policies. It is these relationships that proactively inform the right people to maintain organizational trust in the data.”

We believe our data lineage surpasses the competition, and you should see it for yourself!

To learn more about Alation Business Lineage:

• Read the press release

• View all of the details in the Release Notes

• Get a demo