REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — Alation Inc. launched a series of initiatives to embrace data governance as a strategic use case as part of a broader vision to transform the data catalog into a platform for a broad range of data intelligence solutions, including data search and discovery, analyst productivity, data governance, data stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation. The initiatives include product road map enhancements; upcoming and recently-announced strategic partnerships; a new active data governance methodology, and a series of marketing programs starting with an upcoming webinar featuring Alation customer Riot Games and data governance expert Bob Seiner, author of “Non-Invasive Data Governance: The Path of Least Resistance and Greatest Success.”
“We’re doubling down on data governance in response to both requests from our customers and the realization that the data catalog is the ideal leverage point for applying data governance,” said Satyen Sangani, co-founder and CEO of Alation. “About one-third of Alation customers already leverage the data catalog as a platform for data governance. By working with these customers, we’ve determined how to drive our product strategy, our alliances strategy, our marketing, and our professional services to best embrace data governance as a strategic use case, all as part of our overall vision to transform the data catalog into a platform for a broad range of data intelligence solutions.”
Alation’s Active Data Governance methodology is a people-first, non-invasive approach to data governance that focuses on business needs and delivers trusted data to the enterprise. Currently, 35% of Alation customers use the catalog as a platform for governance. By combining machine learning and crowdsourcing, Alation automates and accelerates data stewardship and embeds governance into the day-to-day activities of data users, effectively applying governance at the point of data use.
The traditional top-down approach to data governance is cumbersome, discourages enterprise-wide adoption, and prevents line-of-business users from finding and delivering quality, curated data to the business at scale, putting data governance at odds with the goals of the business. Empowering enterprises to generate more value from their data is not only critical for mitigating risk and meeting compliance demands, it encourages confident, data-driven decision-making, allowing enterprises to make a greater impact with data and analytics.
“We originally built our data governance practices from the top down with a relatively rigorous framework, and we didn't fully consider the business,” said Amy Keelty, information strategy and governance director, American Family Insurance. “We took the approach of, ‘Here's our framework, and this is what we're going to implement,’ and we ran into challenges. With Alation, we’ve been able to move forward collaboratively with our business partners and anyone affected by our data governance processes. Now we have golden data sources and business rules identified, and descriptions of data all in one place, enabling the business to use the right data at the right time.”
“Now more than ever, organizations recognize that data governance does not require million-dollar investments or a multiyear journey,” said Seiner, president of KIK Consulting. “It is exciting to see how Alation customers are seeing early success from their governance programs by embracing a people-first approach and by leveraging trusted data to transform their business.”
“One of Cisco’s primary goals was to enable the democratization of data while simultaneously ensuring our data was properly governed.,” said Abra Le, senior manager of data governance, Cisco. “To succeed, we needed a user-friendly platform that provided business units with the ability to utilize data and drive their business forward. With Alation, we consistently deliver high-quality governed data with context in a single platform, providing our business users with visibility into what data exists and where it resides.”
Today, enterprises struggle with balancing proper governance of data and widespread access to data. Alation’s data catalog serves as a platform to embed governance initiatives at the point of data use. Alation includes the following features to support its Active Data Governance approach:
● A business glossary provides a single location for business semantics enabling cross-departmental access to business-approved definitions. Alation automatically suggests new and popular business terms to incorporate into business glossaries.
● Crowdsourcing and collaboration opportunities via built-in capabilities, such as articles, conversations, inbox, and trust flags for intuitive knowledge capture and sharing.
● Data Classification and tagging enables mapping data by categories to support analytics and compliance requirements.
● Data quality information is cataloged adjacent to data, informing data consumers of context and quality of the data at the point of consumption and analysis.
● The policy center is a single place for defining enterprise data policies and for agile approvals. Policies are actively communicated to analysts as part of their workflow.
