More than ever, businesses are pivoting to a data-driven culture based on rapid access to trusted information and regulatory compliance. That’s sharpening the focus on data governance as a critical management function.
Vendors across the governance space make similar claims about their platforms. Not all approaches are alike, however. The differences go much deeper than features and capabilities. How you achieve robust governance matters—and so does the role of your governance solution in generating business value.
When choosing a partner, it pays to understand the different approaches and how they can impact you and your users.
Internet users generate about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, and 95% of businesses cite the need to manage unstructured data as a problem for their business.
Source: 25+ Impressive Big Data Statistics for 2022
Alation has always seen data governance differently. Our platform grew out of tools built to serve data analysts rather than data. Immediate business value, inclusiveness and ease of use are foundational because these empower users and encourage widespread adoption.
Data that’s accessible and both useful and usable, with governance that’s open, highly automated and driven by the community with data steward participation. Rapid, broad adoption driven by business value is at the center of our social, collaborative approach to governance and data management. The user, not the process, comes first.
"You can pull together a policy which encompasses all the right things to do at the right time. But if you aren’t able to share that information, and get buy-in and execution from everyone who is accountable, then you are not taking the right approach."
By making governance dynamic and inclusive, a cycle of continuous improvement is established that empowers users and enhances the usefulness of data, not just its control—active, rather than imposed, governance.
Alation Analytics comes with audit query templates as well as support for the creation of custom queries, reports, and dashboards using any business intelligence tool. It is self-managed, meaning that it self-populates, updates autonomously and requires zero maintenance from the governance team.
Traditional governance solutions can be labor-intensive and costly, with human intervention and skillsets required at multiple points. If the objective is getting more business value from data (as opposed to data governance and management), it can be difficult to justify the necessary investment in personnel and expertise.
Traditional governance solutions may be very good at organizing data, but not practical for understanding what is used most or by who—it’s about controlling data, not working with it. Vendors may claim to use automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning to classify data and add context, but the need to approve business terms that the data is linked to before it becomes useful creates a bottleneck.
Alation applies behavioral Intelligence and automation to augment metadata with additional information such as popularity, top users, suggested terms, lexicon entries, context-sensitive classification and discovery—useful information that traditional solutions require the governance team to generate (if it’s available at all). This high degree of autonomy and insight enables greater productivity for stewards so they can engage in governance at scale without the need for a large team.
Alation makes collaborative data use simple. Users can have conversations, publish, share and even work together on the same query. It’s the kind of dynamic, interactive experience familiar to any social media user.
Traditional governance platforms typically have complex and confusing user interfaces that create a barrier to usage and adoption—often usage is limited to expert data stewards because business users find the solution too difficult to work with. The Alation interface is built for use by analysts and business users. The technical complexity of the underlying metadata model does not get in the way and cause friction for the user. This is why Alation adoption growths rapidly across the enterprise.
Ease of use helps, but it’s not everything. Community participation demands widespread adoption not only of the tools, but the data itself. A tool that doesn’t help users get the job done won’t drive adoption no matter how simple it is.
This diagram represents the basic steps needed to migrate a customer from an old catalog environment to Alation’s catalog platform.
First make sure that Alation is configured to store all the same asset types for the same user groups and roles as the legacy catalog. Additionally, permissions should be set on each custom field to match view and edit rights in the legacy catalog.
Ingest all technical metadata from data sources and BI sources using Alation connectors. This process can simply get a listing of metadata and asset types from the legacy catalog and use Alation API utilities to load into Alation.
Migrate lineage automatically via QLI, while enuring legacy lineage is re-configured to point to Alation. This may require writing custom lineage feed code using Alation APIs to insert/update the ongoing feed in the Alation Catalog.
Recreate any custom workflows to ensure all asset creation and changes are persistent in the new Alation data catalog.
Configuration of custom fields to support ‘landing’ of data quality scores through the use of the Alation Microservice framework to configure a feed mechanism.
Alation offers intuitive configuration—a single integrated platform with point-and-click, zero-code setup that can be accomplished at a fraction of the people costs. This is why Alation implementations take a fraction of the time. The Alation Professional Services Right Start model brings the solution to go-live in 10-12 weeks, versus a typical engagement of six to nine months for other vendors.
Alation is simple and flexible, requiring only one server for on-prem deployments. Or it can be implemented in a customer-hosted cloud, or delivered as a SaaS solution.
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Data governance doesn't have to be a 3-year, costly journey. Intrigued? Check out how Alation uses a people-first approach to avoid failed governance programs.
The traditional view is that it’s about being centralized and defensive, ensuring compliance and accountability to reduce business risk. That’s what many solutions are primarily built to do, and for good reason—these are indeed critically important goals.
The Alation view, however, looks forward and sees governance as an essential tool to create business value. We’re taking it to a different place—towards distributed governance where it’s built in by design, not imposed from the outside.
It’s about much more than protecting the organization. It’s about giving users confidence in the data they use to make critical decisions. It’s about unlocking data, improving its quality and making it useful. It’s about empowering people.
