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Data Governance erwin Expert Blog

Automating Data Governance

Automating Data Governance

Automating data governance is key to addressing the exponentially growing volume and variety of data.

erwin CMO Mariann McDonagh recounts erwin’s vision to automate everything from day 1 of erwin Insights 2020.

Data readiness is everything. Whether driving digital experiences, mapping customer journeys, enhancing digital operations, developing digital innovations, finding new ways to interact with customers, or building digital ecosystems or marketplaces – all of this digital transformation is powered by data.

In a COVID and post-COVID world, organizations need to radically change as we look to reimagine business models and reform the way we approach almost everything.

The State of Data Automation

Data readiness depends on automation to create the data pipeline. Earlier this year, erwin conducted a research project in partnership with Dataversity, the 2020 State of Data Governance and Automation.

We asked participants to “talk to us about data value chain bottlenecks.” They told us their number one challenge is documenting complete data lineage (62%), followed by understanding the quality of the data source (58%).

Two other significant bottlenecks are finding, identifying and harvesting data (55%) curating data assets with business content for context and semantics (52%). Every item mentioned here are recurring themes we hear from our customers in terms of what led them to erwin.

We also looked at data preparation, governance and intelligence to see where organizations might be getting stuck and spending lots of time. We found that project length, slow delivery time, is one of the biggest inhibitors. Data quality and accuracy are recurring themes as well.

Reliance on developers and technical resources is another barrier to productivity. Even with data scientists in the front office, the lack of people in the back office to harvest and prepare the data means  time to value is prolonged.

Last but not least, we looked at the amount of time spent on data activities. The great news is that most organizations spend more than 10 hours a week on data-related activities. But the problem is that not enough of that time is spent on analysis because of being stuck in data prep.

IDC talks about this reverse 80/20 rule: 80% of time and effort is spent on data preparation, with only 20% focused on data analysis. This means 80% of your time is left on the cutting-room floor and can’t be used to drive your business forward.

2020 Data Governance and Automation Report

Data Automation Adds Value

Automating data operations adds a lot of value by making a solution more effective and more powerful. Consider a smart home’s thermostat, smoke detectors, lights, doorbell, etc. You have centralized access and control – from anywhere.

At erwin, our goal is to automate the entire data governance journey, whether top down or bottom up. We’re on a mission to automate all the tasks data stewards typically perform so they spend less time building and populating the data governance framework and more time using the framework to realize value and ROI.

Automation also ensures that the data governance framework is always up to date and never stale. Because without current and accurate data, a data governance initiative will fall apart.

Here are some ways erwin adds value by automating the data governance journey:

  • Metadata ingestion into the erwin Data Intelligence Suite (erwin DI) through our standard data connectors. And you can schedule metadata scans to ensure it’s always refreshed and up to date.
  • erwin Smart Data Connectors address data in motion, how it travels and transforms across the enterprise. These custom software solutions document all the traversing and transformations of data and populate the erwin DI’s Metadata Manager with the technical metadata. erwin Smart Data Connectors also document ETL scripts work with the tool of your choice.
  • erwin Lineage Analyzer puts everything together in an easy-to-understand format, making it easy for both business and technical users to visualize how data is traversing the enterprise, how it is getting transformed and the different hops it is taking along the way.
  • erwin DM Connect for DI makes it easy for metadata to be ingested from erwin Data Modeler to erwin DI. erwin DM customers can take advantage of all the rich metadata created and stored in their erwin data models. With just a couple of clicks, some or all data models can be configured and pushed erwin DI’s Metadata Manager.

The automation and integration of erwin DM and erwin DI ensures that your data models are always updated and uploaded, providing a single source of truth for your data governance journey.

This is part one of a two-part series on how erwin is automating data governance. Learn more by watching this session from erwin Insights 2020, which now is available on demand.

erwin Insights 2020

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erwin Expert Blog

Is Climbing the Corporate Ladder Still a Thing?

Thoughts on erwin Insights Day No. 2 Keynote

If you didn’t watch New York Times Best-Selling Author Keith Ferrazzi’s keynote from erwin Insights 2020, what are you waiting for?

I was blown away by Keith’s perspective on “Leading Without Authority” and it got me thinking about my own career, our employees here at erwin, work as we knew it, and work as we’ll know it in a post-COVID world.

Here are my takeaways from Keith’s session from erwin Insights Day No. 2 called “Leadership in Times of Radical Change”:

erwin Insights Leadership in Challenging Times - free access

  1. Don’t Ask for Permission

Keith asked, “How do you become transformational … how do you find the courage to say what’s possible to be that tipping point your organization needs?” The idea of having a vision within the organization and not waiting for the organization to tell you what to do really resonated with me.

So many people see things that need to be done but just sit there waiting – waiting for someone to tell them what they should do. Don’t wait. If needed, ask for forgiveness not permission to do the things that need to be done to create the type of organization you want work for.

  1. Be Your Authentic Self

We all know people who have two personalities – their work face/persona and the moment they leave the office (or log off Zoom) they become their true self. There’s an old-school notion of keeping your personal and professional lives separate. Fortunately, those days have changed.

Today, you need to bring your whole self to work. As employers, we need to give employees the space to be who are they are. And as leaders, it’s ok to be vulnerable – it’s what makes people want to follow you. Our personal lives make us who we are as people and employees, the good and the bad. It’s ok to be vulnerable at work – it builds empathy and trust in the workplace.

  1. Servant Leadership

Being a leader is multifaceted. Servant leadership flips the organizational hierarchy on its head. It puts the employees first – or at the top of the pyramid – and the executives at the bottom.

A book called “The Customer Comes Second” by Hal Rosenbluth focuses on this idea of servant leadership and the principle holds true (if not truer) today – if you put your employees first it will improve morale, performance and ultimately your bottom line.

  1. You’re the CEO of Your Own Career

As Keith points out, leadership has nothing to do with titles. Your career is in your hands, so ask yourself: Am I working with the right people? Is this job good for me right now?

Once you answer those two questions, you can make decisions that best suit you. Additionally, you must be able to cocreate/collaborate. I’ve always paid attention to the people asking the smart questions – and sought out like-minded people to create the type of organization that I envisioned and wanted to be a part of.

Going Forward (Not Back) to Work

What will work life look like in a post-COVID world? Keith says that we shouldn’t think about “going back to work” but rather “going forward to work.”

I love this concept, and I think it’s fair to say that everything has changed and will continue to evolve for quite some time. As more employees work from home or re-evaluate their careers, I believe organizations will become flatter. Therefore, climbing the corporate ladder will become a thing of the past.

Keith’s latest book is “Leading Without Authority: How the New Power of Co-Elevation Can Break Down Silos, Transform Teams, and Reinvent Collaboration.”

You can watch Keith’s presentation as well as all other erwin Insights 2020 sessions on demand.

erwin Insights 2020

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Data Intelligence erwin Expert Blog

Surviving Radical Disruption with Data Intelligence

It’s certainly no secret that data has been growing in volume, variety and velocity, and most companies are overwhelmed by managing it, let alone harnessing it to put it to work.

We’re now generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, and 90% of the world’s data volume has been created in the past two years alone. With this absolute data explosion, it’s nearly impossible to filter out the time-sensitive data, the information that has immediate relevance and impact on your business.

And this time sensitivity is a massive issue, as taking a proactive and data-driven approach can literally mean life or death to your business or to your customers. And that’s where data analytics can play a huge role.

By leveraging the power of the cloud, harnessing data from the Internet of Things (IoT) and other events, and processing this data in near-real time, analytics helps to effectively process the relentless incoming data feed.

Without automation and the development of a governed data pipeline, you’ll never have enough data scientists in the front office to put the data to work. The benefits of fast time to insights is clear, regardless of the industry you’re in.

Think about these examples: a communications agency that needs to get out in front of a difficult message, a retailer driving sales based on real-time customer behavior, a logistics and delivery company needing to understand road conditions, stoppages and up-to-the-minute weather, or a hospital that needs to tailor patient care based on the latest public health findings.

Your data needs to fuel rapid decisions that make your organization more effective, customer-centric and competitive. This was true before the world changed.

COVID-19 Changed Everything

COVID changed everything. It’s a radical disruptor the likes of which we’ve never seen.

As a CEO, a husband and a father, I’ve made decisions during the past seven months that I never dreamed possible, and I’m sure this is true for you and your family – and business – as well.

Now to survive and thrive in the face of radical disruption requires radical transformation and new business models. Reimagining business, like moving fitness centers outdoors, or developing new products and services, such as restaurants packaging fruits and vegetables to sell as food bundles, or market expansion, like traditional grocers that are becoming online shopping hubs.

The companies that come out of this historic period of global uncertainty and change are those who’ve taken intelligent and data-driven approaches to their businesses.

What holds most companies back from faster time to insights and leveraging radical transformation? I think those answers can be found by asking these core questions:

  1. What data do I have?
  2. Where is the data?
  3. What people and systems are using that data and for what purposes?
  4. What processes should governance use?
  5. How is this data relevant and accessible to the business?  

Data Intelligence Provides an EDGE

There’s a common denominator in what they’re all missing, and that is data intelligence.

IDC defines data intelligence as business, technical, relational, and operational metadata that provides transparency of data profiles, classification, quality, location, context, and lineage, providing people, processes, and technology with trustworthy, reliable data.

In a new IDC Solution Brief, “The Value of Robust Data Intelligence to Enable Data Governance with erwin,” its authors state:

Data is the lifeblood of the digital economy — it is what is driving new business models, better customer experiences, better decision-making, and artificially intelligent automation. The global pandemic in 2020 has accelerated digital transformation and amplified the value of data in what will become the next normal as the global economy struggles through recovery. In a world where market conditions, supply chains, work locations, and communication methods are constantly changing, data is a constant source that can be used to inform decisions from crisis to recovery. To use data effectively, it needs to be trusted, understood, and used appropriately, and herein lies many problems that organizations face in the digital economy.

The IDC authors also interviewed erwin customers who described the erwin Data Intelligence Suite, part of the erwin EDGE platform, as a fundamental component of their efforts to generate more value from data while minimizing data-related risk.

The erwin EDGE helps organizations unlock their potential by maximizing the security, quality and value of their data assets, and it operationalizes these steps by connecting enterprise architecture, business process and data modeling with data intelligence software.

The result is an automated, real-time, high-quality data pipeline from which accurate insights can be derived.

The erwin EDGE enables organizations to see how data flows through and impacts all their business, technology and data architectures. Then all stakeholders within a company, those in IT as well as the larger enterprise, can collaborate to make better decisions based upon data truth, not just gut instinct.

Parts of this blog are excerpted from my keynote on day No. 1 of erwin Insights 2020, our virtual conference on enterprise modeling and data governance/intelligence.

You can view the entire keynote and all other sessions of the conference by registering here.

erwin Insights 2020

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erwin Expert Blog

Introducing erwin Insights 2020: Call for Proposals & Engagement

We know these have been unprecedented and challenging times.

While tradeshows and conferences may never be the same, social distancing doesn’t mean we stop learning. In fact, opportunities for personal and professional growth are more important than ever.

I’m pleased to announce that erwin has decided to host an online conference for our customers, partners, prospects and other friends. erwin Insights 2020 will be held on October 13-14, 2020, so save the date!

This free, two-day, entirely virtual event will include live and prerecorded sessions exploring the inherent connections between business, technology and data infrastructures. With synergy between these domains and supporting technologies, organizations have faster speed to insights and the subsequent outcomes that enable them to learn, transform and advance within their industries.

We’re asking for your help in shaping the specific sessions …

  • What industry topics, challenges or best practices would you like us to focus on?
  • Next, are you willing to present a case study? If so, please provide a brief description about the challenges your organization faced, which erwin product you used to tackle it, and the results you’ve seen.
  • Are you interested in leading or being part of a panel discussion? We encourage you to share use cases (e.g., data governance, digital transformation, regulatory compliance, etc.), software tips and tricks, best practices on strategy and implementation, and advice for new users.
  • What other ideas or feedback do you have to help us produce an informative event?

There’s nothing more valuable than hearing from your peers and other erwin customers when it comes to real-world challenges and how other organizations are tackling them.

We need you to share your expertise and insights. See what we did there?

Click here to submit your ideas.