Finding business-critical data to support data consumers should not be a challenge, yet most organizations still struggle. According to a survey conducted by Forrester, analysts spend 76% of their time finding, accessing, validating and preparing data for analysis. The inability to find and validate data results in missed deadlines, wasted resources, and confusion, which translates into poor business decisions. On top of the inability to easily find and access data, many analysts struggle to trust their data. In fact, although organizations have invested in improving the quality of their data, still, data quality and data definitions are not always consistent throughout the entire organization. Recent research has shown that organizations believe that poor data quality is responsible for an average of $15 million per year in losses. More specifically, lack of data quality incurs unnecessary costs associated with data cleansing and rationalizing report redundancies. That being said, gaining trust in your data can be achieved through proper governance and by accessing a single source of truth for business terminology and reporting.
Challenges organization face in making trusted decisions
Making data easy to discover and consume is not as simple as it sounds. It is vital that the right data is shared with the right users. That means data needs to be trusted. It needs to be properly governed to ensure its quality is assured. Without data consistency, data quality or policy enforcement enterprises struggle to:
Locate and trust data
Business users have trouble knowing where to find data that they need, and knowing whether or not they can trust that data to drive efficient business decisions.
Authorize the data
Frequent data brawls occur as different communities of users debate the varying merits of measures in different reports, resulting in wasted time investigating the sources and calculations in reports, KPIs and metrics.
Create and maintain consistency in data definitions
Enterprises’ struggle to create and maintain a single source of truth for business terminology. This leads to a lack of understanding of the data assets and wastes time in reconciling different reports and metrics. This ultimately results in lower productivity and mistrust in data.
Benefits of streamlined trusted business reporting
To succeed, enterprises need to embrace the concept of an enterprise data catalog with embedded data governance capabilities. These capabilities make it easier for business users to locate trusted data, assess it in its proper context, and feel fully confident in its accuracy and relevance. By embracing this approach to data governance, business users are empowered through automated, yet straightforward, capabilities to streamline trusted business decisions. Comprehensive visibility into all relevant data with full business context — where it came from, who owns it, who uses it — provides higher confidence and trust in decision making and in using the data to execute insights. It helps organizations:
Enable smarter decision making
Reduce ‘data brawls’ and empower data citizens to efficiently determine the best report or data set to support data-driven decisions. Increase the time spent on analysis vs. trying to understand the underlying data in a report to generate improved business outcomes.
Collaborate across your business
Interact with enterprise-wide trusted data in order to facilitate a collaborative approach to data governance and self-service analytics. Collaborate to define data, build context, and maintain information as your business changes.
Create a unified view of all data assets
Establish a common understanding by creating a shared language for data assets and meaning within your organization so that everyone works from a single source of agreed-upon truth.
Increase productivity
Access data that you trust, understand, and can use right away. Establish intuitive workflows to manage how metrics, KPIs and reports are verified, governed and certified.
Streamline trusted business reporting with Collibra
Collibra helps to resolve the challenges that cause decision makers to not trust reports by ensuring the common understanding of terms and metrics, documenting data owners and stewards, identifying critical data elements and authoritative data sources, and enabling the certification of key reports and KPIs/metrics. With trusted data in one place and a common understanding around data, Collibra empowers Data Citizens to deliver outcomes that drive quality business results. As a result, businesses are able to reduce 10-20% in BI licenses and reduce 20-50% in report redundancies resulting in a $300K- $3M in annual cost savings.
With Collibra Data Catalog, organizations break down legacy data silos to locate and surface relevant data and enable their Data Citizens to understand and trust the context and relevance of the data, supporting the drive toward self-service business intelligence and analytics.
