How Bluemetrix keeps Data Governance in sync with Data Pipelines

For Data Governance to be successful, it must always be in sync with the data it’s supposed to be governing.

When people talk about digital transformation, an important aspect of it is the collection and subsequent analysis of data. In many ways, without data, there is no transformation.

Let’s take financial services as an example. Data is the lifeblood of such organisations. Data allows banks to examine their customers’ behaviour which leads to better insights into their financial needs and requirements, and ultimately, into financial products which become tailored and sold to them. Without data, this wouldn’t be possible.

The Importance of Data Governance

All organisations need a robust data governance policy that crucially, is in sync with the data pipeline. Being in sync with your data is an ongoing process which ensures that the data which is ingested into your organisation from its many sources or pipelines, is treated in a uniform way.

For example, the data must be checked for errors and consistency and must be aligned with the policies and procedures that your organisation has in place. According to Gartner, poor data quality cost organisations on average $15 million in 2017.

If your data governance runs independently of the pipeline, you won’t be able to capture data changes as they happen whether in real-time or on a daily basis.

Furthermore, it can affect how you manage a specific rule within your overall data governance policy: how you govern real-time data.

Real-time Data Governance

While there are Metadata Management Solutions such as Collibra and Alation to assist with these issues, the fundamental problem is that there isn’t a link between such solutions and what’s actually happening with as the data changes.

In short, they don’t automatically update your data governance policies.

Additionally, this is not an issue that is going to get easier in the short term as the myriad ways that companies generate, store and process their data keeps evolving.

It was not too long, most data was stored on-premises and the amount of data was manageable. Compare that to the daily increase in data and the various ways that the data is collected: from on-premise, the cloud to apps and mobile devices.

If your data governance is out of sync with the data, you are at risk of poor reporting, while unsecured data may fall foul of regulations such as the GDPR, and any benefit of the data to the profitability of your organisation will obviously suffer.

That syncing feeling

Ideally, data governance is best performed by a systems agnostic platform that automates the data governance and engineering tasks thus speeding up the process while removing the potential for human error.

Being systems agnostic means that you can apply sophisticated, flexible rules across your organisation while making sure that your data will always be in sync, and therefore be aligned with your data governance policies.

With Bluemetrix solutions, we capture an organisation’s metadata at the pipeline creation stage and by automatically updating the data catalogue to reflect the changes, it means that data owners have the most up-to-date picture of their underlying data.