What’s Wrong With Today’s Data Catalog?

Team Zaloni May 17th, 2017

Maybe you never thought about it, but your data catalog has a personality. It’s kind of a wallflower, relying on IT to “ask” it to the dance. What if, instead, your data catalog could be the life of the party, leading the way to a more data-driven organization?

What’s wrong with my data catalog?

We agree that data catalogs to this point have provided good value for businesses. They can support new data initiatives, enable regulatory compliance, increase data preparation productivity and improve data quality control.

However, the problem with traditional data catalogs is their “passive” nature. We are finding that more of our customers want to be able to take action from their catalog to allow their data consumers to not only understand what data they have but use it to support a more data-driven business approach. They want the data catalog to function as the starting point for self-service activities such as data provisioning and transformations. In this ideal scenario, the platform would enable data consumers to browse for data in the catalog and then transform and move it to a sandbox or analytic or reporting environment.

If not a data catalog, then what?

A future-proofed data catalog is what we call an “active data hub,” meaning an integrated catalog that enables faster delivery of “actionable” data to line of business (LOB) users. In addition to enabling users to discover data, an active data hub serves as the foundation of all self-service data activities. This built-in functionality helps ensure a self-service architecture that provides faster time to insight and reduced IT workload while ensuring a governed and managed process throughout the entire data supply chain. This is absolutely essential for being able to trust your data quality and truly derive value.

The benefits of an active data hub include:

• Significantly reduces the load on IT and eliminates bottlenecks
• Makes finding relevant data easier and faster for lines of business (LOBs)
• Provides self-service enrichment and actioning of data by LOB users
• Unifies traditionally fragmented management and BI solutions
• Enables the delivery of curated datasets to LOBs and data consumers

Zaloni Active Data Hub

Zaloni helps enterprises create active data hubs using the Zaloni Arena DataOps platform, which allows different teams to access the hub at any level and speed – whether they want to find data, enrich it, or “action” that enriched data from a self-service environment to their business applications. To be a “data hub,” a data management platform must be able to integrate with and leverage existing data management infrastructure so that any work that needs to scale, or be operationalized into an ongoing process can be managed via the IT team’s existing processes, reducing the need for users to learn new tooling or technologies.

Learn more about Zaloni’s approach to transforming data catalogs, best practices for successful enterprise-wide implementation and real-world case studies in our webinar, Transforming a Passive Data Catalog into an Active Data Hub.

about the author

Team Zaloni

This team of authors from Team Zaloni provide their expertise, best practices, tips and tricks and use cases across varied topics incuding: data governance, data catalog, dataops, observability, and so much more.