Do you have the ambition to turn your organization into a data-driven enterprise? You cannot escape the need to accurately map all your data assets, monitor their quality and guarantee their reliability. Data lineage can help you accomplish this mission. Here are some explanations.
To know what data you use, what it means, where it comes from, and how reliable it is throughout its life cycle, you need a holistic view of everything that is likely to transform, modify or alter it. This is exactly the mission that data lineage fulfills, which is a data analysis technique that allows you to follow the path of data from its source to its final use. A technique that has many benefits!
Benefit #1: Improved data governance
Data governance is a key issue for your business and for ensuring that your data strategy can deliver its full potential. By following the path of data – from its collection to its exploitation – data lineage allows you to understand where it comes from and the transformations it has undergone over time to create a rich and contextualized data ecosystem. This 360° view of your data assets guarantees reliable and quality data governance.
Benefit #2: More reliable, accurate, and quality data
As mentioned above, one of the key strengths of data lineage is its ability to trace the origin of data. However, another great benefit is its ability to identify the errors that occur during its transformation and manipulation. Hence, you are able to take measures to not only correct these errors but also ensure that they do not reoccur, ultimately improving the quality of your data assets. A logic of continuous improvement that is particularly effective for the success of your data strategy.
Benefit #3: Quick impact analysis
Data lineage accurately identifies data flows, making sure you never stay in the wrong for too long. The first phase is based on the detailed knowledge of your business processes and your available data sources. When critical data flows are identified and mapped, it is possible to quickly analyze the potential impacts of a given transformation on data or a business process. With the impacts of each data transformation assessed in real-time, you have all the information you need to identify the ways and means to mitigate the consequences. Visibility, traceability, reactivity – data lineage saves you precious time!
Benefit #4: More context to the data
As you probably understood by now, data lineage continuously monitors the course of your data assets. Therefore, beyond the original source of the data, you have full visibility of the transformations that have been applied to the data throughout its journey. This visibility also extends to the use that is made of the data within your various processes or through the
applications deployed in your organization. This ultra-precise tracking of the history of interactions with data allows you to give more context to data in order to improve data quality, facilitate analysis and audits, and make more informed decisions based on accurate and complete information.
Benefit #5: Build (even more!) reliable compliance reports
The main expectations of successful regulatory compliance are transparency and traceability. This is the core value promise of data lineage. By using data lineage, you have all the cards in your hand to reduce compliance risks, improve data quality, facilitate audits and verifications, and reinforce stakeholders’ confidence in the compliance reports produced.
