Alation Extends the Data Catalog to Include Analytics Stewardship for the Enterprise

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – Dec. 10, 2019 – Alation Inc., the data catalog company, today announced the general availability of its Analytics Stewardship application in the Alation Data Catalog. This industry breakthrough product offering is complemented by a professional services accelerator that together provide an easier and faster way for enterprises to drive more value from self-service analytics while ensuring accurate, compliant data use.

With massive amounts of distributed data being generated and analyzed, enterprises struggle to ensure accurate use of data and analytics, leaving businesses vulnerable to compliance risks and making decisions based on faulty data analysis. Many organizations struggle to balance the critical inter-dependency between top-down governance and bottoms-up analytics stewardship and are narrowly focused on solving one or the other. Alation’s Analytics Stewardship offerings bridge the gap between top-down policy-setting by governance teams and policy interpretation and enforcement by analysts and self-service data users, creating a more collaborative and holistic approach to governance.“Alation gives us the visibility to contend with the enormous amount of data our business generates, prioritizing our stewardship efforts and applying data policies at scale to all of our data sets. With Alation, we have a single source of reference to monitor which business units have made progress or not in improving data sets, giving us greater visibility into department-level stewardship efforts and measure the impact these efforts have on our analytics,” said Markus Schmidberger, Director of Data Technology at Scout24. “Alation’s stewardship capabilities are helping us build a data culture that will advance innovation within our digital marketplace.”

Alation’s new Analytics Stewardship application and accelerator provide an answer to these challenges, and include:

• New Alation Policy Center: Providing a single point of reference for enterprise policies for the use of data and analytics.

• Alation Catalog Sets: Automating the application of policies consistently across all connected data assets in an organization.

• New Alation Stewardship Dashboards: Providing crucial feedback to stewards on the impact of their efforts with the ability to assign stewards to specific data assets and let them track their progress. Embedded gamification features tap into the psychological motivation to encourage documentation and curation.

• New Auto-Discovered Glossary: Extending the Alation Data Catalog’s existing business glossary with machine learning technology that automatically suggests new business glossary terms based on patterns of organizational usage and prioritizes them based on popularity, saving stewards time and effort.

• Analytics Stewardship Accelerator: Guiding organizations from program inception to best practices and providing playbooks and templates to help start a balanced approach to stewardship, including key decisions about what to steward and what to measure.

“With Alation we now have the right framework to start a broad-based analytics stewardship program which is essential in maximizing the data we use every day to run our business. Providing stewards with the ability to prioritize data curation allows us to identify the most impactful data sets for our data analysts and data consumers to confidently leverage and gain value from. This ties into our other governance efforts such as master data management. Alation provides us with the ability to both track our curation efforts and measure our progress,” said Minna Karha, Head of Data at Finnair.

“Enterprises must ensure that data is used properly and that analytics are accurate, and used in adherence with policies and protect consumer privacy, particularly in light of regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Striking the balance between data governance and creating greater value from data is a huge challenge for data leaders. The upside and opportunity from data is massive, but so too are the consequences of noncompliance and inaccurate information,” said Satyen Sangani, CEO and co-founder of Alation.

Alation’s extension of the Data Catalog to include new analytics stewardship features was inspired by the growing list of customers interested in moving beyond automated cataloging to actively stewarding data and analytics for their enterprises. The new features and functionality were designed in collaboration with more than 20% of Alation’s current production customers, including: American Family Insurance, Finnair, GoDaddy, MercadoLibre, and Scout24, among others.

• To learn more about Alation’s Analytics Stewardship application and accelerator visit: Alation Analytics Cloud

• Watch our on-demand webinar to learn how American Family Insurance has structured their governance and stewardship program