As organizations segue into the modern world of digital transformation, one of the side effects is the ever-growing amount of data present in nearly every facet of our lives. The sheer volume of data has become so prevalent that the government has begun to adapt new policies designed to add structure around the massive quantity of data being harvested, accessed, or used in any capacity.
In recent weeks, the Department of Defense (DoD) has laid out a new set of “five data decrees.” These decrees are designed to help in the process of creation, publication, protection, management, and use of data. In an effort to build awareness around the initiative, the Pentagon issued this memo which released the decrees to the general public. It reflects that data sharing and data cataloging are the top two on their list.
Maximize Data Sharing to Improve Business Outcomes
Data sharing is critical to expand analytics capabilities across the enterprise and empower line-of-business workers to conduct their own analysis. Companies with strong data sharing capabilities are experiencing greater year-over-year business improvements in workforce productivity, increased speed in their decision-making abilities, much higher employee trust, and elevated customer satisfaction. In fact, according to Aberdeen’s research, 71% of companies who have fully-adopted the sharing of their data have identified a boost in workforce productivity over the previous two years. In contrast, only 51% of companies with just adequate or even weak data sharing capabilities have seen an increase in workforce productivity (see the figure below for more details).
Companies with Strong Data Sharing Capabilities are Seeing Greater YoY Business Improvements
Rather than relying on data professionals, companies should increase the amount of data sharing across functions and help people gain independence to utilize data on their own. Companies with strong or mature data sharing capabilities simply see greater adoption of analytics across various lines-of-business. Essentially, the more data that’s being shared the right way, the better impact it has for the entire organization.
Publish Assets in a Data Catalog Along with Common Interface Specifications
Data cataloging: the process of making an organized inventory of your data. This data inventory involves a collection of metadata which can be combined with data management and search tools to helps data users find the data that they need. This catalog also provides information to evaluate the fitness of data for intended uses. Data catalog technology improves organization and data governance, which pair well with data sharing by helping to ensure quality across the organization.
Dedicated Data Catalog Technologies Are on the Rise
The above table shows that data cataloging improves integration, accessibility, and organization of data sets across the organization to support data discovery and governance capabilities. To that end, Aberdeen data suggests that nearly 20% of companies are not using a data catalog today, and 40% of companies don’t have a dedicated technology to support their data catalog needs. There is a lot of work that needs to get done if public sector organizations want to begin meeting these new data requirements.
Usher Public Sector Data Management Into the 21st Century
With greater accessibility and quality, employees across the public sector are better able to conduct analyses, make predictions to drive actionable insights, and have trust in their data. Solutions that promote data sharing and support a data catalog infrastructure will also aid companies in their pursuit of making data-driven decisions across all levels and business units.
Considering the vast amount of data in the world, finding a system for managing that data not only provides public sector organizations with a quicker, cleaner, and more transparent analysis, it also provides access to a well-organized data catalog at employees’ fingertips to drive more-informed business decisions.
How Alteryx Helps
The explosion of analytics means getting everyone on the same page has never been more important. The powerful data cataloging provided by Alteryx Connect centralizes business terms and definitions, metrics, and information assets for maximum consistency, discoverability, and collaboration. Building a trusted, shared business and data catalog has never been easier.
This Means Teams Can Discover More. Faster.
- Cut the time spent searching for data across the organization: Direct everyone in your organization to a common place to find, share, and collaborate on information assets, and minimize wasted time and duplication of effort.
- Utilize your organization’s knowledge: Discover the types of information your data contains, where the information comes from, who is using it, and how it is used.
- Maximize reuse: Use powerful search capabilities to find and reuse information in analytic apps, workflows, macros, visualizations, dashboards, data science models, and more.
- Find trustworthy and curated information: Reduce the time spent searching for the best data and assets and avoid ones that have been rated poorly by others in your organization.
Analytics That Everyone Can Agree On
Centralize your business metrics and field definitions, information assets, and data source definitions in one searchable glossary. It’s the perfect foundation to power Center of Excellence or governance initiatives, or simply ensure everyone is speaking the same analytics language.
- Business glossary: Define your standard business terms in a data dictionary and link them to assets in the data catalog.
- Asset catalog: Assemble all your information in one place by collecting metadata from your information systems.
- Data discovery: Discover the information you need to drive better business outcomes through powerful search capabilities.
Engender Collaboration and Trust
Creating a data catalog is a team sport. With Alteryx Connect, you can empower analysts to share, identify, and rate information assets. Get visibility into how data is being used and its lineage to make business decisions that are underpinned by a foundation of trust.
- Data enrichment and collaboration: Annotate, discuss, and rate information assets to provide business context and provide your organization with the most relevant data.
- Certification and trust: Understand the trustworthiness of information assets through certification, lineage, and versioning.
- Data lineage: See how data moves across systems and drill into a metadata graph to get a view of inputs/outputs.
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