Alation embarks on initiatives to promote data governance

Alation, a provider of enterprise data intelligence solutions, has launched a series of initiatives to promote data governance as part of the company’s broader vision to transform the data catalog into a platform for a broad range of data intelligence solutions. These solutions can include data search and discovery, analyst productivity, data stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation.

According to Alation, the traditional top-down approach to data governance is cumbersome, discourages enterprise-wide adoption, and prevents line-of-business users from finding and delivering quality, curated data to the business at scale, putting data governance at odds with the goals of the business, says Alation. In contrast, the company contends, its Active Data Governance approach guides more accurate analysis on trusted data, empowering enterprises to generate more value from their data, which is not only critical for mitigating risk and meeting compliance demands, but also encourages confident, data-driven decision making, allowing enterprises to make a greater impact with data and analytics.

The initiatives include product roadmap enhancements, upcoming and recently-announced strategic partnerships, a new Active Data Governance methodology, and a series of marketing programs.

“We’re doubling down on data governance in response to both requests from our customers and the realization that the data catalog is the ideal leverage point for applying data governance,” said Satyen Sangani, co-founder and CEO of Alation. “About one-third of Alation customers already leverage the data catalog as a platform for data governance. By working with these customers, we’ve determined how to drive our product strategy, our alliances strategy, our marketing, and our professional services to best embrace data governance as a strategic use-case, all as part of our overall vision to transform the data catalog into a platform for a broad range of data intelligence solutions.”

Alation defines its Active Data Governance methodology as a people-first, non-invasive approach to data governance that focuses on business needs and delivers trusted data to the enterprise. Thirty-five percent of Alation customers currently use the catalog as a platform for governance. By combining machine learning and crowdsourcing, Alation automates and accelerates data stewardship, and embeds governance into the day-to-day activities of data users—effectively applying governance at the point of data use.

Alation includes the following features to support its Active Data Governance approach:

• A Business Glossaryprovides a single location for business semantics enabling cross-departmental access to business-approved definitions. Alation automatically suggests new and popular business terms to incorporate into business glossaries.
• Crowdsourcing and Collaborationvia built-in capabilities such as articles, conversations, inbox, and trust flags for intuitive knowledge capture and sharing.
• Data Classification and Taggingenables mapping of data to data categories, ensuring data is effectively classified and tagged to support analytics and compliance requirements.
• Data Qualityinformation is cataloged adjacent to data, informing data consumers of context and quality of the data at the point of consumption and analysis.
• Policy Center is a single place for defining enterprise data policies and for agile approvals. Policies are actively communicated to analysts as part of their workflow.

For more information, visit www.alation.com.