Five stories of uniting data and meaning through data catalog software

[jrineakter]

Data catalog software solutions are not silver bullets by themselves, even if Gartner now calls them a “must-have.” Why?

The real problem facing every organization is the divide between data and meaning. Right now, data catalog tools fire people up because of their ability to democratize data across the organization. But data is only meaningful to business decision makers if it is enriched with context. And data context comes from people as well as metadata.

Understanding this is the difference between making the right or wrong decisions with data. Take the nuance of using the imperial versus metric systems. For hanging a shelf, using the wrong unit definition might not be a big problem. To NASA, that gap in understanding lost $125 million in 1999. On a larger scale, this divide between data and meaning is part of the reason the U.S. economy lost $3.1 trillion to bad data in 2016.

How data catalog software helps connect data and meaning
Here are some examples of how our customers use an enterprise data catalog to connect data with meaning. Note how each story involves multiple different stakeholders to include the context from people in addition to metadata:

One of the world’s biggest software companies created a business glossary and dashboard catalog.

A multi-billion-dollar software as a service company focused on financial and human capital management uses data.world’s cloud data catalog to index and organize its information assets, and align them and the people who use them on a common business glossary. By building a single source of truth, the company makes it easier hong kong whatsapp number data for all of its employees to find what they need, get help from the right colleagues, and use trusted data in a consistent way. This makes data more accessible, increases its value and usability, and eliminates redundant work.

Global management consulting company makes it easier to find data more quickly.

Another customer has historically been on the leading edge of innovation by collecting and applying data to help its clients answer a wide variety of business questions. Any delay in answering a client’s question could mean lost revenue for the organization, so they looked to streamline the process for searching for, understanding, and using data to produce analysis.

This company used our data catalog to create a curated, user-friendly data portal. This portal connected owned, purchased, and derived analysis so consultants could find the right data faster and use it more often in more projects, eliminating redundant work. And since data.world automatically collects context and ongoing analysis and identifies relationships between datasets, projects, and teams, the firm’s teams become smarter, more connected, and data efficient over time.

The Associated Press uses curated datasets to change the way local news is reported.

On any given day, more than half the world's population sees news from the Associated Press (AP). Much of that exposure happens when local media runs AP articles, or reports them through a local lens. But getting story-relevant data into the right hands in local newsrooms is no small feat. Previously, data would reach the wrong people, get distributed at times that did not match user needs, and get lost in inboxes far from those who could use it. AP and its members needed to make sense of the explosion of data for breaking news and enterprise reporting. The most time-consuming aspect of this work (estimated at 80 percent of total project time) was finding, vetting and cleaning data. The barrier to entry is high, and local newsrooms often lack the time, staff, and tools.