The data catalog, or how to support your company's data culture
Have you ever thought of equipping your company with a data catalogue?
Today, no-one can deny the vital importance of using data to develop and manage any business. Gone are the days when business strategies were driven by intuition: data is king, and companies are becoming increasingly data-driven.
In such a context, where data exploration and governance represent a major challenge, data cataloguing is proving to be a valuable tool, particularly in supporting the spread of a data culture, even among less technical profiles.
But what exactly is a data catalogue? And how can organisations use this tool to drive growth? This article looks at the definition, functions, use cases and examples of software.
What is a data catalogue?
Definition of a data catalogue
A data catalogue is defined as a system that indexes, centralises and provides a unified view of all a company's metadata.
The data catalog also provides a complete view of the characteristics of each piece of data, whatever its source (CRM, ERP, external sources, etc.) and its nature (structured or unstructured, dynamic or static).
But this tool goes even further, enabling the automation of actions taken on this data (classification or traceability, for example).
💡 What is metadata? Literally "data about data", it is all the information used to describe a piece of data (type of file, origin, date, etc.).
Main features of a data catalogue
The functionalities can obviously change from one data catalog solution to another. However, some of them remain essential:
- The metadata register: this is a system for obtaining the precise business and technical characteristics of each item. This functionality also includes the creation of a taxonomy, using tags for example.
- The search engine: in an environment where the quantity of data is increasingly massive, the data catalog search engine helps you to access data from a query, filter it, sort it, classify it and so on.
- Collaboration and crowdsourcing: since collaboration and the sharing of data-related knowledge are key to data culture, the tool must also offer collaborative features. These include the ability to add annotations, share and assign data, etc.
- Data lineage: data lineage involves mapping the data's life cycle, so as to know where it comes from and what changes it has undergone. These various transformations are then recorded in a data processing register, enabling us to meet the requirements of European regulations (RGPD).
- Data profiling: data profiling is used to analyse and summarise data in order to obtain an overview of certain exploitable elements relevant to the company, such as the identification of sensitive data or general trends.
- Connectors: data catalogues are connected to different data sources, such as your ERP or CRM systems, to collect all your metadata in real time.
- Decision-support tools: dashboards, for example, provide an overview of the company's performance in terms of data management. Some solutions also incorporate scoring functions to determine the quality of your data, making it easier to take strategic decisions.
- Access and systems management: this means, for example, being able to define upstream the roles of employees: who has access to what, what actions can be taken by each person, and so on.
- Documentation: a data catalogue can contain documentation to help users manage their metadata.
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Advantages of the data catalog
According to Forrester, the benefits generated by companies that have made use of Big Data since its inception amount to... 1,200 billion dollars!
Given this situation, the use of data catalogues is a valuable asset, for a number of reasons:
Data culture and collaboration
The data catalog opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the use of data, in particular by taking the exploitation of data sets out of the purely technical sphere. All of the company's business lines can now explore the company's data and exploit it more easily to meet business challenges.
At the same time, data specialists have a tool at their disposal to help them evangelise their teams and instil a genuine data culture based on collaboration.
Reliability and security
Thanks to updates and real-time data collection, users can be sure that they are using the right data, so as not to corrupt their decision-making.
The data catalogue also meets security objectives: control access to data and define roles to determine which employees have access to which information.
Time savings and efficiency
Finally, it's worth pointing out that using a data catalog saves a great deal of time. Data searches and identification are simplified and made more fluid. The result? Teams have more bandwidth to devote to value-generating actions.
Users and functional uses of the data catalog within the company
A number of business areas are affected by the use of a data catalog within a company.
The main ones are
🧑💻 Data analysts: they are responsible for processing and analysing the company's data. Their objective is to extract usable information from it in order to support the company's growth by contributing, for example, to the definition of a marketing strategy.
👉 F or data analysts, the data catalogue is a facilitator of access to data. Thanks to this tool, they can quickly and easily find all the information they need for their analysis.
🧑💻 Data governors: they take a long-term view of the use of data, in order to maintain and improve its quality with a view to the company's business development.
🧑💻 Data stewards: more focused on the data itself, their role is to organise the 'stewardship' of the data (how it is stored, consulted, used, etc.).
👉 Note that in small organisations, data stewardship and governance are often handled by a single person. The data catalog enables him or her, among other things, to organise and qualify the data, to have a system for instilling a solid data culture within the organisation, but also to manage access to the information.
But the strength of data catalogs also lies in their ability to appeal to profiles other than data teams (marketing teams and business analysts, for example), thanks in particular to the ease of use of certain solutions.
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Data catalog: which solution should you choose?
Focus on three high-performance data catalog solutions available on the market:
🛠️ DataGalaxy: DataGalaxy is a 360° data catalog, designed to adapt to both IT and business needs. It includes all the functions required for an effective data catalogue (search engine, data lineage, collaboration, etc.). What's more, the solution stands out for its accessibility, ease of use and rapid deployment.
🛠️ Google Cloud Data Catalog (or GCP data catalog): Google Cloud, which needs no introduction, has also developed its own data catalog offering. While the solution offers the classic features you'd expect from a cataloguing solution, it also offers users the power of Google technology in terms of infrastructure and security.
🛠️ Talend Data Catalog: Talend, the publisher behind the Data Services Platform, has enhanced its offering with a data catalog solution. This saves time by automating numerous processes (access management, traceability, data protection management, etc.), made possible by intelligent relationships and machine learning.
So, are you ready to move to a 100% data-driven culture thanks to the data catalogue? Tell us about your experience in the comments section.
Article translated from French