The data we were working with a few years ago, is not the same as the data nowadays. The volumes are bigger, there is more variety and changes. Without proper metadata management you will get lost and miss out on the value your data can provide.
Data needs to bring value - otherwise there is no point in storing it. To get value from data you need to understand it first. This might be difficult without proper documentation, especially for business users.
Even small changes in the data or data schema can affect the results of an analysis or crash an app. The more data you have, the more important it is to track these changes.
Enterprise data consists of multiple data types - customer data, transaction records, emails, support tickets, images, etc. To get insights from data, you need to document and catalog it first.
Having data you can’t trust can cost your company millions of dollars. Hygiene of data is key for accurate results in analytics. To ensure it, you need to take care of data quality - data documentation with data profiling and community feedback can help with it.
Since the pandemic has started many companies have switched to remote work and most employees aren’t planning to go back to the office for 40 hours per week. They need to have access to the knowledge about company’s data from home.
Analysts and business users should be able to use data for analytics without help from IT. The same goes for new employees in IT - they shouldn’t have to waste precious time of senior developers with questions about the database. With comprehensive documentation everyone would able to understand and use the data by themselves, no matter who and where they are.
To avoid costly mistakes, all descisions should be made based on data. To make data-driven decisions though you need to understand your data first and be sure that you can trust it.
Business users don’t want to (and shouldh’t have to!) be reliant on IT when it comes to access to data and analyzing it. Data democratization is required and can be achieved throug proper metadata management.
SInce GDPR, CCPA and other data protection regulations took efect, comapnies have to be much more careful about processing personal data.
It is important to be able to easily identify where personal data is stored to protect it and process only according to the rules. Otherwise the goverment might impse a fine on your company.
Cost of searching for the data
Searching for the data in all your databases – CRM, ERP, data warehouse, data lake, etc., can be a very tedious task. When you find the right tables, you still need to understand meaning and logic of specific columns/fields and joins with other tables. That task takes time and was probably done in your organization a number of times. Do not reinvent the wheel multiple times. Create a data documentation once and share it across organization.
Risk of bad decisions
Poor understanding of data leads to poor data analytics and poor business decisions. Data documentation can save your company from unimaginable amount of money & time you could lose due to bad decisions.
Risk of lost knowledge
If you don’t document your knowledge about data, it can leave your company with people who have it. Replicating that knowledge might take many months or even years and even then, it still may be hard to learn all the tricks, exceptions, and why certain design decisions were made.
Cost of scaling of the data team
Starting to work with a new data source can take many days or weeks. Even identifying key tables and entities may be a challenge. When everyone is learning just for him/herself then your organization multiplies that time for each person. Onboarding new people is a lot easier when you have documented your data.
Understand & easily discover relevant data
Collect and combine knowledge about data from many different sources to make smarter data-driven decisions. Decrypt table and column names with business friendly aliases and provide meaning and purpose of data assets with descriptions. Use sample data to learn what data is stored in your data assets. and make sure that the data is good quality.
Build a community around your data
Build data literacy, democratize data and empower everyone in your organization to make better use of your data with lightweight on-premises data catalog. Allow everyone to share their observations and to accumulate valuable knowledge in one place through comments, ratings, questions, to-dos, and warnings.
Comply with data protection regulations
Scan your databases and find and tag fields holding personal data and private health data so you can know what data you are processing and where to comply with data protection regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA.
"Dataedo is improving my work a lot. With documentation, the learning curve is smaller and I can have more time to work."
"Thanks to Dataedo I spent more time figuring out the connection string to the instance than I did running the report. It was a great experience."
"We jump started all of our Data Governance efforts using the tool. We documented key databases quickly and easily and published the information to our analyst community."
"Dataedo is an easy to use facility for managing basic metadata centrally and producing enhanced data dictionaries."
"Dataedo helps developers to find descriptions for data very quickly. Seeing documentation progress with every release is really helpful."