Does a Data Catalog Help Companies With Data Stewardship Programs?

By implementing a data stewardship program in your organization, you ensure not only the quality of your data but also that it can be used easily and effectively by all your employees. As a key player in data governance and management, the Data Steward needs specific tools, the first of which is the data catalog.

The role of data in companies is becoming increasingly strategic, and not just for large organizations. Indeed, to define business strategies, manage distribution, or organize production, the exploitation of data constitutes a major competitive advantage. To deliver its full potential, data must be reliable, of high quality, and perfectly organized. These characteristics are linked to a discipline: Data Stewardship.

The Data Steward, also known as the Master of Data, acts as the guarantor of optimal data exploitation. How? By centralizing all data, regardless of its source, in an environment that is accessible to all business lines in a simple, intuitive, and operational manner. A Data Stewardship program is based on a rigorous methodology, a global vision of available data, and an ambition to rationalize data to develop a strong data culture. However, vision, understanding, and methodology do not exempt the Data Steward from relying on the right tools to accomplish their missions: a data catalog is one of the essential tools for a successful Data Stewardship project.

A Data Catalog’s Objectives

A data catalog exploits metadata – data on data – to create a searchable repository of all enterprise information assets. This metadata collected by various data sources (Big Data, Cloud services, Excel sheets, etc.) is automatically scanned to enable users of the catalog to search for their data and get information such as the availability, freshness, and quality of a data asset. A data catalog centralizes and unifies the metadata collected so that it can be shared with IT teams and business functions. This unified view of data allows organizations to:

• Sustain a data culture.
• Accelerate data discovery.
• Build agile data governance.
• Maximize the value of data.
• Produce better and faster.
• Ensure good control over data.

The Benefits of a Data Catalog for Data Stewards

From importing new data sources to tracking information updates, the ability of a data catalog to track and monitor metadata in real-time automatically allows data stewards to gain efficiency. A data catalog provides 360° visibility into your data from its origin to all of its transformations over time. There are four key benefits to using a data catalog as part of a Data Stewardship program:

Benefit 1: Maintain up-to-Date Documentation

Your data is constantly active. It is collected, valued, exploited, enriched… To have a perfect understanding of your data assets, you need up-to-date documentation regarding its data sources and how they are used. A data catalog is designed to do just that.

Zeenea’s advantage: Our catalog automatically retrieves and collects metadata through our APIs and scanners to always ensure that your data is up-to-date. View your data’s origins and transformations over time with our smart lineage capabilities.

Benefit 2: Ensure Data Quality

The first vocation of a data catalog is to keep a clear view of your data via metadata. The definitions, structures, sources, uses, procedures to follow…by nature, metadata management by a data catalog contributes to guarantee the quality of your data.

Zeenea’s advantage: Our data catalog enables your Data Stewards to build flexible metamodel templates for predefined and custom item types. Simply drag & drop your properties, tags, and other fields into your documentation templates for all your catalog items.

Benefit 3: Comply With Data Regulations

Compliance with data regulations is a crucial issue in a Data Stewardship program. A data catalog, through its ability to organize data and centralize it in a clear, healthy, and readable environment, helps to comply with these regulatory requirements.

Zeenea’s advantage: Through machine learning capabilities, our Data Catalog speeds up time-consuming tasks by analyzing similarities between existing personal data. It provides smart recommendations by identifying and giving suggestions to tag personal data.

Benefit 4: Monitor Data Lifecycle

Between governance, quality, and security, your Data Stewardship project implies monitoring the lifecycle of your data in real-time. The data catalog responds to this challenge by offering you the possibility to monitor all activities affecting your data.

Zeenea’s advantage: our data catalog provides Data Stewards with a dashboard that tracks and monitors metadata activity. Check the completion levels of your documentation, the most frequently accessed and searched for catalog items, the connectivity status of your catalog, and get smart recommendations on the sensitivity level and additional properties to add to your fields.

Organization, knowledge, transparency, scalability…a data catalog is tailored to accompany your Data Stewardship project.

Start a Data Stewardship Program With Zeenea

Zeenea Data Catalog provides a metadata management solution that enables Data Stewards to overcome the challenges associated with handling increasingly large volumes of data. Our solution helps organizations maximize the value of their data by reducing the time spent on complex and time-consuming documentation tasks, and by breaking data silos to increase enterprise data knowledge.

About Actian Corporation

Actian makes data easy. Our data platform simplifies how people connect, manage, and analyze data across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. With decades of experience in data management and analytics, Actian delivers high-performance solutions that empower businesses to make data-driven decisions. Actian is recognized by leading analysts and has received industry awards for performance and innovation. Our teams share proven use cases at conferences (e.g., Strata Data) and contribute to open-source projects. On the Actian blog, we cover topics ranging from real-time data ingestion, data analytics, data governance, data management, data quality, data intelligence to AI-driven analytics.