3 Tips on how to leverage the IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog to get trusted data
In this digital world, where data is the new gold standard, businesses need to understand how to quickly uncover data and turn it into actionable insights. Before attempting to turn data into analytics, businesses need to first make sure they have clean, trusted data to rely on. As we all know, “garbage in, garbage out”. Fortunately, we understand that both data governance and data quality go hand-in-hand and you can’t have one without the other.
Reliable data brings peace of mind and increases time to market for new assets. The IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog (WKC) powered by IBM Cloud Pak for Data allows organizations to have self-service access to quality data that they can quickly and efficiently govern on a single platform.
The IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog is a data catalog that serves as a single version of the truth for different users including data engineers, business analysts, data analysts, data scientists, and data citizens. Users can gain access to data they can trust, govern, curate, share and manage within an organization. Beyond that, you can add data policies and rules around your data to ensure your information doesn’t get into the wrong hands and is compliant. Take control of your data by protecting your sensitive information and tracing the lineage of your data. You should always be certain of where the data came from and how it is being used in your organization.
The data governance, data quality, and policy management capabilities within the IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog will help make your data business-ready. The journey to AI starts here, with clean and trusted data.
Is your data business-ready? Keep reading to find tips on how to leverage the IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog to get trusted data.
1. Trust your data with data governance
One of the most common pain points that my customers have is not knowing how to govern their data. They are often unsure where their data is coming from, who has access to the data, and how the data is being used. Data governance encompasses the people, process, and technology needed to establish a process for effective data management throughout an organization. Lack of effective data governance can not only cause security and compliance risks, but it can also cause organizations to lose money.
The IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog enables users to protect their data from misuse and mishandling with self-service capabilities that include creating data rules. Confidently share assets within your organization securely by utilizing the dynamic data masking. Data masking is the method of hiding original data to protect sensitive information, such as personal identity information. For example, within Watson Knowledge Catalog, you can make a data protection rule to mask all social security numbers and label it as classified information. This drastically protects information from both accidental and intentional threats to security.
While quickly discovering assets with intelligent recommendations powered by machine learning, trace exactly where your data is coming from and who touched it by using data lineage to build confidence when doing business reporting. The data lineage capability is great for compliance reporting and allows users to quickly answer questions about data without the need to ask the IT department. Unlike other vendors, IBM offers a fully-integrated data and AI platform that allows customers to automate the data governance process. Using the IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog can result in improved productivity and efficiency within your organization.
2. Enrich your data with data quality
In this data-driven age, it is almost impossible to understand your clients and your organization without high-quality data. You want to make sure your organization has the most accurate data about your clients and potential clients to drive business.
The IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog makes it easy for even non-technical users to interactively discover, cleanse, and automatically profile data with a built-in data refinery. Find out key information by understanding your data through visualizations, dashboards, and built-in charts to improve reporting and analytics. The IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog allows users to improve business results by enriching data quickly and efficiently.
If you are not convinced that data quality is important, rest assured that your competition does, and they will not hesitate to improve their competitive advantage.
3. Organize your information with a data catalog
If not handled properly, data is only an asset and not a valuable commodity. Businesses can no longer afford to solely rely on the IT department to handle all of their data needs as this can lead to data silos and lack of communication within an organization. A data catalog can help business users understand how data is used from a technical standpoint and help technical users understand data from a business perspective. This creates a synergetic environment and better communication between everyone.
The data catalog in the IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog allows users to create, understand, and share a common business language to prevent miscommunication within an organization. The integrated capabilities of data governance, data quality, and analytics enable businesses to curate analytical assets, machine learning models and notebooks.
“What makes it especially attractive is that it enables us to develop and deploy new models quickly that brings AI to the data, rather than the other way around.” — Abdulaziz Al Khalifa, CEO, Qatar Development Bank
In 2018, Forrester named IBM a leader in Machine Learning Catalogs. With machine learning at its core, IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog stands out from the competition because it enables users to unlock the value of their data with built-in data governance, a user-friendly UI that creates a collaborative environment for different personas to work more efficiently, natural language search capability, and the ability to leverage both Watson APIs and open source technology.
Are you ready to leverage the Watson Knowledge Catalog to get trusted data?
The IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog is a powerful machine learning data catalog that can provide an end-to-end self-service environment for data governance and data quality. It also creates a collaborative environment for your analysts and data scientists to work together on analytics, reporting, and data models.
If you are working towards making sure that your organization has the most accurate data to turn into actionable insights, then I challenge you to try out the Watson Knowledge Catalog.
Learn more about the IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog and try it out for free here.
Author: Erin Scott, IBM
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this publication represent those of the author and not of IBM.
