An intelligent data catalog with data quality, governance, and data consumption capabilities to deliver business-ready data
By: Kyle Daye, Austin Robichaud
According to an MIT Study, 85% of enterprises view AI as a strategic priority; however, 81% do not understand the data required for AI. With 80% of enterprise data being either inaccessible, untrusted, or unanalysed, data citizens need a comprehensive building block approach to understand their data, make their data AI-ready, and drive data monetization for their organizations.
IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog is the market-leading quality, governance, and cataloging solution for creating and delivering business-ready data to data citizens. Powered by Cloud Pak for Data, the open information architecture solution seamlessly integrates IBM's data integration, data quality, and governance solutions within one unified experience, while empowering users from across an enterprise to discover, catalog, and activate their data. At the core of this integrated experience is DataOps — defined by the Gartner Group as a collaborative data management practice focused on improving the communication, integration, and automation of data flows between data managers and data consumers across an organization. Watson Knowledge Catalog is purpose-built to help enterprises leverage to avoid the pitfalls of splintered AI approaches. By incorporating DataOps methodologies that bring automated data curation, data discovery and classification services, Watson Knowledge Catalog enables organizations to deliver business-ready data at speed and scale, and maximize ROI from their AI initiatives.
What's New
End-to-End Solution for Business-Ready Data
Watson Knowledge Catalog is now the only end-to-end fully integrated solution for Data Integration, Quality, Governance, and Consumption. With an intuitive persona-driven experience for data scientists, business analysts, data stewards, data quality analysts, along with customizable new user roles, it provides a robust, tightly unified ecosystem of IBM enterprise products in a single solution. Watson Knowledge Catalog prepares organizations to be ready for AI, and scale quickly with data that is meaningful, trusted, and of quality. The Gartner Group's research publication entitled “Building Data Lakes Successfully,” shows that a vast majority of organizational approaches struggle to achieve business-ready data due to a lack of an end-to-end fully integrated platform. We believe these piecemeal strategies lead to performance bottlenecks, confusing errors, and technological shortcomings.
IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog now aligns directly with the Gartner Group's vision for a consolidated, end-to-end solution. Under one new umbrella, IBM has now integrated data quality and data governance with the consumption features of the original Watson Knowledge Catalog. The Information Analyzer and Information Governance Catalog tools that today’s top companies rely on to inventory, cleanse, monitor, and leverage their information have been adopted and improved for tomorrow’s timely and confident business decisions. Enterprises can now efficiently and transparently advance their business objectives while enforcing regulatory and internal compliance. Faced with requirements to scan millions of tables and files, IBM clients can trust Watson Knowledge Catalog's new, powerful functionality to accelerate their journey to AI within a single, unified experience.
Addition of Workflow
Watson Knowledge Catalog has included new functionality for approving and publishing governance artifacts per the organization's RACI matrix. A RACI matrix (Responsible, Actionable, Consulted, Informed) defines the roles and responsibilities for processes or projects, to ensure that key stakeholders are involved in decisions and are held accountable. Many organizations are hindered by the lack of communication and clear responsibility when managing business workflows that support the authoring and maintenance of their data governance programs, which can contribute to costly delays and missed deadlines. The addition of workflow in Watson Knowledge Catalog allows for collaboration with other users in the RACI matrix while also providing transparency on the progress and each person's activity in real-time. Based on the open-source workflow project Activiti, Data Stewards can create, update, review, and approve assets, while providing domain expertise to keep users informed of progress at all times. This new workflow ensures corporate accountability in the management of business terms, policies, rules, reference data, data classes, and classifications for your business.
Enhancements to Business and Technical Metadata Definitions
With this release, there have been significant user experience and design enhancements for the authorship of terms, data classes, classifications, as well as policies and rules. In terms of design, organizations will see improvements with Data Classes when defining technical metadata for automatic profiling. Furthermore, improved user experiences with Classifications allow users to more deeply describe data, and with Policies & Rules, enable users to describe governance activities around data. Lastly, the improved overall user experience to Categories helps users to organize these artifacts. Together, these significant upgrades help organizations build a consistent, actionable language across their enterprise.
Addition of Reference Data management
Watson Knowledge Catalog now provides the functionality to create and manage reference data within a single location. IBM believes in the importance of a centralized reference data management process that allows data citizens to record and make known the permissible values of an entity or concept. The new simple drag-and-drop features make mapping columns from .csv files to the reference dataset's code, values, and description fields convenient and straightforward. Once completed, data stewards can further align such reference data values to enrich, develop, and identify glossary terms, policy, or classification objects. Furthermore, they can use reference data to support data integration or data quality analysis.
Simply put, the unique end-to-end solutions for Data Integration, Quality, Governance, and Consumption within IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog are the keys to turning the disparate big data from within your data lakes into targeted and useful insights. Sharing that information as fast as it's collected in an automated and controlled manner helps reduce time to value, reduce confusion, and increase productivity across the enterprise. Furthermore, with the self-service capabilities for finding, accessing, preparing, and analysing data, IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog is an intelligent way to make data accessible and valuable to any data citizen who needs it within your organization.
Ready to learn more about IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog?
Read this solution brief to better understand how to provide business-ready data to your data citizens, and for more information on why an integrated data quality and governance solution is crucial for a successful AI adoption, watch The Key to Implementing Successful AI.
#GlobalDataOps