If You’re Not Governing Your Data, You’re Doing It Wrong

It’s no news that the volume of data is growing exponentially. It’s also well-understood that all that data holds the key to analytics that can deliver ground-breaking insights for organizations across industries and around the world. But if you’re like most organizations, tapping that potential has been elusive and the reason is becoming increasingly clear: The data is not unified, understood and well-governed.

As a way forward, IBM’s Unified Governance strategy can deliver an integrated and flexible platform enabling you to unleash the value of your data for wider use within the enterprise. It provides governance-as-a-service to be infused into self-service analytics, applications, business and data integration processes, helping to make governance pervasive across the enterprise and helping to ensure that data is in line with industry and corporate regulations, such as GDPR, Basel II, and others.

Once the platform is established, a CDO can monitor the state of data governance for all information assets (structured, unstructured, APIs, models, etc.) across public and private cloud. Besides avoiding bottlenecks, that means avoiding any number of potential business exposures.

At the same time, business users can explore new sources of data to support analytics for potentially better business outcomes. They can use a free format search to find relevant information across information assets (structured and unstructured). Results are presented in a graph explore (knowledge graph) so that the user can understand details about the information that they are looking for. Example: Business definitions, data quality score, ratings, related information assets (reports, models, etc.), policies and rules that need to be applied to this data, and which other users have access to the same data. They can also engage in a social collaboration with other users within the enterprise, make comments, rate and share information assets.

At its core, IBM’s Unified Governance consists of a shared metadata persistence layer supported via an ORM metadata repository, a graph store, an open discovery framework (ODF) and a series of microservices, including auto-discovery, auto-profile, auto-classification, auto-quality, machine learning services, and auto-term assignment. Those microservices are designed to automate the data quality and metadata curation tasks and help to reduce the cost of managing and governing data. At the same time, the microservices can increase the value of data lakes, data warehouses and self-services analytics. And to top it off, Unified Governance supports a rich set of tools for metadata import for RDBMs, Hadoop, BI tools, and open source Apache Atlas.

And the innovation doesn’t stop there. IBM’s roadmap for Unified Governance in 2018 looks to extend capabilities for governance-as-a-service:

• Policy awareness via Apache Atlas™ and Apache Ranger™
• Integration with Watson Data Platform for metadata exchange and policy awareness
• New machine learning capabilities to help automate core activities such as data quality management and policy management and data curation
• Continuing the journey to help simplify user experience with persona-based UIs
• New dashboards for business users
• Flexible workflow management to enable organizations to streamline data governance and data quality activities
• Enabling intelligent data findability for DSX users allowing them to find, understand and use data across the enterprise

Taken together, the diverse and powerful capabilities of Unified Governance can help you bridge the gap between your reams of data and turning that data into action. Learn more here about what we’re doing for organizations across the globe.