Managing data is a collaborative approach in the IT department and in the WFH era, data catalogs have become a must-have for data-driven organizations. Infogix Executive Vice President Emily Washington details why employees working with data need self-service tools like data catalogs for supporting data governance and data analysis.
Telecommuting and flexible workplace environments have seen a popularity boost in recent years. The number of people working remotelyOpens a new window increased by 173% between 2005 and 2020, according to a recent study from Global Workplace AnalyticsOpens a new window .
By empowering employees to choose where they work, both the employer and employees realize several benefits. For example, employers build better relationships with their employees, increase employee retention rates, save money on office space, and have access to more job applicants because the geographical location is less of a concern. On the other hand, workers save time commuting to the office, enjoy a better work/life balance, and faceless distractions from their colleagues.
Due to COVID-19Opens a new window , many businesses transitioned to nearly all remote work lifestyles. Many were not prepared to handle the distributed environment of their data landscape. With the increased importance of enterprise data to achieve business intelligence, not all data-driven companies had the IT infrastructure in place to quickly transition to a remote work environmenOpens a new window t. How are IT teams, business analysts, data scientists, and other employees who rely on large amounts of data to do their job supposed to remain successful working from home?
Learn More: Remote Work Is Here to Stay: How Will IT Teams be Impacted?Opens a new window
Why is it Difficult to Utilize Enterprise Data from Home?
Managing data is a collaborative approach among diverging lines of business and the IT department. As a unified team, all these disciplines ensure that business users can quickly analyze and apply data to make essential business decisions. However, by removing personal contact, communication suffers, reducing the awareness and availability of usable information.
Despite the availability of modern data managementOpens a new window tools and technologies, there are still situations where business users can’t locate the data they need, and this is exacerbated when working remotely. As a result, business users call on the IT department, who are busy ensuring security standards and fixing network vulnerabilities. Once IT fulfills one request, three more are submitted, overwhelming IT resources. IT is understandably stressed and it’s difficult for business users to remain productive without having the data they need at their fingertips.
In any work from home scenario, companies must ensure business users can easily find and utilize data, without depending on IT.
Learn More: Embrace Strong Digital Workplace Strategy to Thrive, Not Survive Remote WorkOpens a new window
Establishing Data Availability and Trust to Empower Remote Employees
Equipping data users with self-service tools, like a comprehensive data catalog, enables self-service data extraction, transformation, and analysis from remote locations. This begins with constructing a data catalog that requires a unified approach to data governance and data quality.
Utilizing data governance to build a centralized data catalog makes large quantities of information available to an organization’s workforce, from anywhere, anytime. Data governance encourages a collaborative approach to data management, allowing different departments to measure information value. Ensuring the catalog focuses on essential data that drives their company’s operations and insights are key.
In the end, the data catalog chronicles extensive details about an organization’s high-value data assets in an easy to understand format. A robust catalog includes:
- Identification features to recognize data owners, stewards, users, and subject matter experts, so business users know who to ask when they have data questions.
- Policy management capabilities so the IT team can manage usage restriction rights and communicate data access methods.
- Simplified workflows to help business users resolve data issues.
- Automated discovery components to document data across the enterprise and encourage remote workers to quickly search for, locate, and access data.
- Business and technical lineage to paint a clear picture of the flow and dependencies of data, supporting the identification of critical systems and business process relationships and the impact they have on data.
- Data quality metric baselines to establish and monitor ongoing data integrity scores.
- Socialization components that provide clarity into data integrity scores and inform users which data is best suited for their purposes.
- Collaborative features so users can communicate with one another in a centralized location.
Developing a data catalog through data governanceOpens a new window that includes extensive data quality capabilities empowers employees, whether working remotely or in the office, to quickly process their own data requests. As a result, business users can trust their data and their decisions and the business runs smoothly, generating data-driven business intelligence, regardless of work.
Let us know if you liked this article on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you!