Data Governance Made Easy with a Tool — Today’s Highlight: Collibra

Data professionals everywhere are under increased scrutiny to manage data effectively. The story is common: you’re collecting data, but you want to make sure you’re managing it securely, ensuring its quality, and complying with regulations. You also want to make sure there are clear roles & responsibilities around who can access and handle your very valuable data assets, and that clear data policies are in place to enforce this. In short, you need to make sure your data is properly governed.

Easier said than done, governing effectively is a universal struggle, whether in a country, organization, or community, and data is no exception. We know that with all the complexities of data, successful data governance can be more easily achieved with the support of a modern data governance tool.

10 Ways A Modern Data Governance Tool Can Accelerate Your Data Governance Journey

Collibra is one example of a powerful data governance platform, it’s not the only one, but it provides a solid solution. Here are 10 impressive capabilities that illustrate why it’s such a hit in the data community:

1. Data Dictionary and Catalog

Helps organize and classify your data in order to standardize data definitions. It’s like creating a shared language for your data, so everyone in your organization has a common understanding. Users can easily search for data assets, view their metadata, and understand their lineage.

2. Data Lineage and Impact Analysis

Ever wondered where your data comes from and how it’s used? It creates a map of your data’s journey so you can spot any hiccups in the process.

3. Data Quality Management

It sets the rules, checks the data’s quality, and even sends out repair orders when things go awry to ensure maintained data is clean and reliable.

4. Data Stewardship and Collaboration

Keeps everyone accountable for their data. It assigns responsibilities, enforces the rules, and allows collaboration to fix data problems.

5. Compliance and Regulation

Helps you follow data protection regulations like GDPR and CCPA, and allows for the management of data access, retention, and auditing, so you can avoid costly legal troubles.

6. Workflow and Automation

Streamlines data governance processes by offering customizable workflows and automation features, including ML-generated rules to detect breaking trends, catch bad data, and stop sending it downstream. This reduces manual effort and ensures that data governance tasks are executed consistently.

7. Data Privacy and Security

Helps you identify sensitive data, keep an eye on who’s accessing it, and enforce data protection policies.

8. Reporting and Dashboards

Tracks your data governance activities with advanced dashboards, helping you make data-driven decisions.

9. Integration with Your Data Ecosystem

Integrates seamlessly with data management and analytics tools, including data warehouses, data lakes, and business intelligence platforms. It also integrates with your data cloud, so you don’t have to transfer data out of your data warehouse, and you can securely process it in your data cloud. It’s the ultimate team player in your data ecosystem.

10. Reference Data Management

Allows you to systematically reconcile data between systems for more accurate reporting and analysis. This allows you to identify missing records and broken relationships as you move data across systems and define complex mappings between them to enable crosswalks from one information system to another.

Why Invest in a Data Governance Tool?

Surprisingly, despite the advanced stage of the data landscape,the Wavestone Data and Analytics Leadership Annual Executive Survey 2023, reveals that a significant number of organizations still face substantial challenges in effectively governing their data:

Only 40% of organizations have developed and implemented well-established, well-understood, and well-executed standards and practices for data
Only 24% report that they are doing enough to ensure responsible and ethical use of data
Only 24% have created a data-driven organization (meaning one where quality & governance is strong enough to leverage their data to make informed data-driven decisions)

A glimmer of hope is that 42% of organizations indicate that they increased investment in data quality in 2023, and Data Governance & Data Management are in the top 5 primary CDO responsibilities this year.

Achieve Your Goals

The trend is clear – Data executives know that they can’t lead their organization to becoming data-driven without high-quality data that is properly governed. This sounds like a big undertaking, but data governance doesn’t have to be a headache – Data Governance tools like Collibra simplify the whole process, from organizing your data to ensuring its quality and complying with regulations.

Additional Tip

While tools like Collibra can certainly assist, the path to data governance nirvana is fraught with challenges. Embrace the fact that you are on a journey that is never ending. Leveraging the right tools, partners, and governance will help accelerate your ride.