In this 5-part series, I’ll walk you through some of the details around trusted data discovery, or governed data discovery. The goal is to get you past the mom-and-apple-pie idea of trusted data discovery and into some specific areas you can address at your company.
First, trusted sources. Trusted data comes from trusted, curated sources–thoughtfully formed, reviewed, and operationalized. Your company put in a lot of time, effort, and money to create these sources for a reason. Use them. And have your business analysts use them easily. This means that IT creates a sandbox of access permissions, and the business should be able to easily create visualizations on these sources without leaving their environment. It is absolutely
imperative that the business has access, and that they can answer the questions about where the data for their insights/decisions came from with confidence. Timo Elliott’s cartoon does a great job illustrating a situation that I’m sure never happens in your company.
But all the insights you need and decisions you crave cannot only be answered in these enterprise sources. Instead, some analysts have hallowed spreadsheets, reference tables, extracts from older or intractable systems, or online sources. In some cases, those data sources are very large (weather for the last 20 years, home sale prices for the last 20 years, social media feeds for a few key products #becauseyourecoollikethat). Sometimes these details are stored on the web, on a desktop, or in a data lake.
The thing is…these sources are not all uniformly formed, codified, and fielded. Sure, you could put in a request for your data management team to do all of this work for you…and when you find a new source tomorrow, you could log another request. But this is not a productive use of your data management team, and it wastes precious time for you. Bill Gates wrote that business is moving at the speed of thought—you don’t have time to waste!
The solution is to bring these data preparation capabilities directly into your agile visualization workflow. But…does that break the whole “trust” and “curated sources” topic we just talked about?
Mostly no, and here’s why:
- Most of the modification and transformation should be done on the non-enterprise sources that have not been as curated as your enterprise sources.
- Some solutions, like SAP Lumira, can remember all of the modifications you did and replay them when the data is refreshed.
It would be great if you had a feedback mechanism from the modifications made on enterprise sources back into your information governance team, so those changes could be evaluated according to the information governance policies (and perhaps permanently implemented). If that sounds interesting, check out the information governance capabilities assessment.
Stay tuned for Part II–Trust, But Verify: Enterprise Security.
For more insight on effective marketing strategies, see How to Create Better Marketing Stories: Find the Heroism.