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Everybody talks about putting an enterprise’s data stores to work for the company, but actually delivering analysis from all that data that helps line-of-business employees make the right decisions in a timely fashion is where the rubber meets the virtual road. It’s not easy to do that well.
This is where data governance software maker Collibra comes to the rescue. It brings a “data shopper’s” approach to the task of finding and analyzing volumes of data.
The New York City-based company on Oct. 24 introduced Collibra Catalog, a new data catalog that the company claims helps data scientists and citizen data analysts spend less time looking for data and more time solving critical business challenges.
Collibra Catalog is available as part of Collibra’s most recent platform release, v5.0, a data governance package with an intuitive user interface designed for non-IT employees. The Collibra platform can be cloud-based or on-premises, whichever works best for the user.
Uses ‘Consumerized’ Approach to Finding the Right Data
Collibra 5.0 takes a consumerized approach to data governance technology that enables business users to research and find data in much the same way as they shop for products normally on consumer sites, such as Amazon and iTunes. It then gives data researchers and other line-of-business (LOB) employees a head start on finding the right data and putting it to immediate use.
“I guess you could call this the ‘Amazonification’ of the data set,” CTO and co-founder Stijn Christiaens told eWEEK. “People have all kinds of difficulties finding and understanding the data that’s out there, but the first problem you have is you can’t find the data. Then when you find it, you don’t know what it means, or who’s responsible for it, where it came from or whether you can get access to it.
“People spend a lot of their time doing that, so that’s why we call ours the ‘Amazon experience.’ Amazon saves you from going through a library or a bookshop and asking the clerk or surfing the bookshelves. When it comes to data, this is cumbersome. We give the same experience; you come in, you search for customer data or product data or churn data or what have you. We come back with a number of results. It can be results from previously created data sets—certified or non-certified data sets.”
Collibra 5.0 as a ‘System of Record’
Collibra 5.0 serves as a system of record, providing a data governance backbone that helps organizations increase the value of their data and eliminate data silos, Collibra co-founder and CEO Felix Van de Maele said.
Key features in Collibra 5.0 include:
—Collibra Catalog: Collibra Catalog helps the business data analyst discover, describe, assemble and govern data sets to improve trust in analytics based on those data sets. It serves as a single source of intelligence for data experts and other data citizens across the organization who need quick access to enterprise data. This frees business intelligence analysts from wasteful data wrangling so they can devote more of their time to solving real business problems. Self-service data citizens can use existing data in new and different ways, driving insight through collaboration and crowd-sourcing to increase the value of existing data assets and eliminating data silos.
Collibra Catalog also features unique data catalog functionality that incorporates machine learning functionality to serve up increasingly relevant data to users over time. It also provides out-of-the-box operating models and flexible structure for easy-to-use information about any type of data.
—Collibra Connect functionality then links the data sources, business applications, data lakes, data quality systems and all sources of metadata into a responsive system. These connections enable changes to be detected and policies applied immediately, without manual steps, driving active data governance.
New usability features in Collibra 5.0 include:
—Global Create: Allows users to create a new item of any type, any time, without navigating to a particular view.
—Global Views: Allows users to customize and save specific data views within different Collibra applications.
—Working View: Allows users to customize any view of their data at any time, then save and return to that working view at a later date.
—Faceted Filters: Much like consumers can run a filtered search on Amazon seeking specific shopping criteria such as size and color, Collibra enables data citizens to search for data by any characteristic belonging to that data.
—View Improvements: Users can more flexibly sort, add to, delete and reorder data.
—Diagram overlays: Delivers an improved data lineage experience to allow users to improve visualization of lineage and relationships.
Collibra’s management console is integrated within the Collibra Data Governance platform to simplify data housekeeping chores and enable the management of an enterprise data governance system.
Collibra 5.0 is also available for mobile users on iOS and Windows devices.
For more information, go here.