Data is a critical component of most businesses these days. That’s because with the right data and machine learning, data users can leverage historical information about their business and its customers in real-time. Data analytics is making major strides in offering dynamic new ways for companies to utilize data, including in areas like predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics, not to mention robotic process automation. That being said, in order to really make the most of your data source, you need to have it well organized. Otherwise, your business users won’t be able to get the insights you need.
Especially if you have different business terms that play a role in your day-to-day operations, metadata management, and data management more generally, are important components of handling your data properly. So, how do you go about managing your data effectively and efficiently? The best way to manage data from a variety of data sources is with something called a data catalog. Learn more about data catalogs (including why a data catalog can improve your company’s productivity) below.
What exactly is a data catalog?
In the world of digital transformation, data catalogs have a pivotal role to play. This is because if your business users aren’t able to access or find the data source or data assets they’re looking for, they won’t be able to add more business value to your company. A data catalog, much like a catalog for a department store, offers a way to organize and curate data. Annotations, metadata, and other tags allow data engineers, data analysts, and other business users to find the data they need in your database based on certain keywords. As a result, even if you have data assets in data lakes or silos, everything can be found quickly and efficiently with a query. This means that everyone in your business can be data consumers rather than feeling like they need to be a data scientist in order to find the right data to use for their metrics, analysis, and reporting.
How can a data catalog boost performance in your business?
If you want to make the most of your enterprise data, you need to be sure that every employee has the access they need to the data sources that help them perform their job. As such, a data catalog can boost performance just from the perspective of making certain that everyone on your team can use the data sources they need to in order to do their job well. Especially if you deal with a lot of data in real-time, being able to access your data assets quickly by searching through metadata can be a major boon as far as efficiency is concerned. By that same token, metadata and data catalogs can also help you stay on top of regulatory compliance. This is because using metadata to tag certain datasets as containing sensitive information about medical data or financial payments can help you live out your privacy policy and control who has access to certain information and when. In the world of automation, data catalogs can also be helpful, since they ensure that the proper data is always being pulled anytime a script or program runs and makes a request. As such, data catalogs are critical to running robust reporting for your business.
As you can see, in order to properly leverage your datasets, it’s important that your data source is organized so analysts can make the most of your data. A data catalog can be especially helpful in these sorts of scenarios, offering a way to manage technical metadata and better organize your enterprise data catalog. As a result, every employee can work towards becoming better data stewards in your company’s operations.