A champion of Collibra Catalog: Lockheed Martin discusses their journey to become data-driven at the Tableau User Conference
Collibra joined Lockheed Martin Aeronautics at the Tableau Conference in Las Vegas on November 13, 2019, to discuss Lockheed Martin’s journey to becoming a data-driven enterprise. This presentation highlighted the importance of Collibra Catalog in enabling Lockheed Martin to discover, understand and trust their data.
The value of a data-centric organization
Rick Thomas, a presales engineer at Collibra, kicked off the presentation discussing the business value of becoming a data-centric organization. According to Rick, data-driven companies see 4% higher productivity and 6% higher profits. These statistics illustrate the value of data in creating accurate, intelligent and innovative business decisions. Rick talked about four common challenges to become a data-driven organization.
- Deficient financial sources
- Lack of organizational alignment
- Concern regarding the regulatory environment
- The inability to find the “right” data.
Despite these challenges, Lockheed Martin did not shy away from becoming a data-centric company.
Lockheed Martin’s journey to Data Intelligence
Adam Mohr, Software Engineer Manager at Lockheed Martin, began his portion of the presentation by stating that Lockheed Martin is going through a substantial change to alter the way they do business. Lockheed Martin is striving to become data-driven to give the best possible value to its customers. The most important outcomes of their digital transformation are
- Agility
- Speed
- Competition
- Insight
Despite Lockheed Martin’s enthusiastic push to becoming data-driven, the company struggled to centralize its data. Before implementing Collibra, data existed across all internal organizations and frequently became siloed within certain groups. Data Citizens had to manually find and request data from various organizations across the whole enterprise. This process slowed down the time to insights and often resulted in the replication of effort.
With Collibra, Lockheed Martin now transcends organizational silos. They enhanced their effectiveness and efficiency of utilizing their data to generate business insights. At Lockheed Martin, Collibra is the central element in their data marketplace. In the presentation, Adam emphasized the importance of the lineage feature in Collibra Catalog. Collibra Lineage allows Lockheed Martin to trace aspects and attributes of a workbook and report in Tableau, thus empowering Data Citizens to easily find and trust their data. In addition, through an enterprise Business Glossary with defined data definitions, all Data Citizens across Lockheed Martin better understand and utilize their data. These crucial features speed up discovery to insight at Lockheed Martin. Furthermore, Adam stresses the importance of governance, claiming that Collibra’s certification of data increases the value of the data available. With various organizations sharing, collaborating, and utilizing a company’s data, it’s crucial that this data is governed and trusted.
The business value of Collibra
Adam concludes his presentation by discussing the business value of Collibra. Lockheed Martin’s investment in Collibra changed the way the company utilizes its data. Collibra made Lockheed Martin a Data Intelligent company by providing risk mitigation, accelerating the discovery to insight timeline, giving context to the data available, and enabling agility across the organization and with customers. Lockheed Martin is a clear champion of Collibra. They see the value in Collibra and recognize Collibra’s ability to transform an organization into a data-driven enterprise. Thank you to Adam and Lockheed Martin for sharing your story with us!
