The data catalog, or how to support your company's data culture
Have you ever thought of equipping your company with a data catalog?
Today, no one can deny the vital importance of data in the development and management of any business. Gone are the days of intuition-driven business strategies: data is king, and companies are becoming increasingly data-driven.
In such a context, where data exploration and governance represent a major challenge, data cataloging is proving to be an invaluable tool, supporting the spread of a data culture, even among less technical profiles.
But what exactly is a data catalog? And how can organizations leverage this tool for growth? Find out more in this article, including definitions, functionalities, use cases and software examples.
What is a data catalog?
Definition of a data catalog
A data catalog is defined as a system that indexes, centralizes and provides a unified view of all a company's metadata.
The data catalog also presents a complete view of the characteristics of each piece of data, regardless of its origin (CRM, ERP, external sources, etc.) or 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 (file type, origin, date, etc.).
Main features of a data catalog
Of course, functionalities may vary from one data catalog solution to another. Nevertheless, certain features 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, a data catalog's 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 functionalities. These include the ability to add annotations, share data, assign data, and so on.
- Data lineage: data lineage involves mapping the data's lifecycle, so as to know where it comes from and what changes it has undergone. These various transformations are then recorded in a processing register, enabling us to meet the requirements of European regulations (RGPD).
- Data profiling: data profiling is used to analyze and summarize data in order to gain an overview of certain exploitable elements relevant to the company, such as the identification of sensitive data or general trends.
- Connectors: data catalogs are connected to various 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 your company's performance in terms of data management. In addition, some solutions integrate scoring functions to determine data quality, thus facilitating strategic decision-making.
- Access and systems management: this means, for example, being able to define upstream the roles of employees: who has access to what, what actions are possible for each person, and so on.
- Documentation: a data catalog 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 using Big Data since its inception amount to... $1,200 billion!
Given this situation, the use of data catalogs is a valuable asset, for a number of reasons:
Data culture and collaboration
The data catalog opens up a whole new world of data usage possibilities, taking the exploitation of data sets out of the purely technical sphere. All business functions can now explore their company's data and exploit it more easily to meet business challenges.
At the same time, data specialists have a tool to help them evangelize their teams and instill a genuine data culture based on collaboration.
Reliability and security
Thanks to real-time data updates and harvesting, users can be sure that they are using the right data, so as not to corrupt their decision-making.
The data catalog also meets security objectives: control access to data and define roles to determine which employees have access to which information.
Time savings and efficiency
Last but not least, 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.
Data catalog users and functional uses within the company
Data catalogs can be used by a wide range of business functions.
The main ones are
🧑💻 Data analysts: they are in charge of processing and analyzing the company's data. Their aim is to extract actionable information to support the company's growth by contributing, for example, to the definition of a marketing strategy.
👉 F or data analysts, the data catalog 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 how data is used, in order to maintain and improve its quality in line with the company's business development objectives.
🧑💻 Data stewards: more focused on the data itself, their role is to organize the "stewardship" of data (how it is stored, consulted, used, etc.).
👉 Note that in small organizations, data stewardship and governance are often handled by a single person. The data catalog enables him/her, among other things, to organize and qualify data, to have a system for instilling a solid data culture within the organization, but also to manage access to 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 to choose?
Focus on three high-performance data catalog solutions available on the market:
🛠️ DataGalaxy: DataGalaxy is a 360° data catalog, designed to meet both IT and business needs. It includes all the functions required for an efficient data catalog (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 all the classic cataloging functions you'd expect, it also offers users the power of Google technology in terms of infrastructure and security.
🛠️ Talend Data Catalog: Talend, creator of the Data Services Platform, has enhanced its offering with a data catalog solution. This saves time thanks to the automation of numerous processes (access management, traceability, data protection management, etc.), enabled by intelligent relationships and machine learning.
So, are you ready to move to a 100% data-driven culture thanks to the data catalog? Tell us about your experience in the comments.
Article translated from French