Data Governance Preparedness: Using Data Catalogs to Ensure Your Organization Has the Relevant Insights to Weather Any Crisis

The COVID-19 crisis has elevated the importance of data literacy and intelligence and made the right data governance platform, including a modern data catalog, essential to organizations so they can make both short- and long-term decisions.

Now as the world tries to transition from a state of emergency response to disaster recovery, organizations must attempt to understand how they need to operate in a post-COVID world. From a strategic perspective, they need to know which processes and systems are key to business continuity so they can emerge from a pandemic, a data breach or any sort of major disruption that threatens their workforce, operational effectiveness or regulatory compliance.

An agile, intuitive, robust data governance capability with business user friendly visualizations paves the way for evaluating an organization in its current state and then evolving it to serve new objectives. To produce such data intelligence, data practitioners can coordinate automated processes to survey the data landscape and collect, accumulate, document, collate and publish critical information about the data assets available for use across the enterprise.

A data catalog is a key technology enabling enterprise-wide data governance and intelligence. The goal of this paper by industry analyst David Loshin is to explore the types of capabilities a modern data catalog provides, differentiating needs based on specific use cases and offering clarity when considering data catalog requirements.