Your Guide to Machine Learning Data Lineage for BI: From Source to Target
Too often, data lineage is considered a linear course that does little more than reveal the route data took to arrive at its final destination.
Actually, effective data lineage delivers important enhancements to BI and enables informed decision-making, as it enables data teams to tackle numerous use cases such as regulatory compliance, system upgrades & migrations, M&A (system consolidation), reporting inaccuracies, business changes etc.
Here are some scenarios in which companies found real benefits from automated data lineage solutions:
Data Lineage Enables Complex Data Processing Operations
As a core principle of data management, all BI & Analytics teams engage with data lineage at some point to be able to visualize and understand how the data they process moves around throughout the various systems that make up their data environment. When conducted manually, however, which has tended to be the normal mode of operation before companies discovered automation – or machine learning data lineage solutions, data lineage can be extremely tedious and time-consuming for BI & Analytics teams.
By adopting automated data lineage and automated metadata tagging, companies have the opportunity to increase their data processing speed. That increase can manage huge endeavors, such as migrations, error location, and new data governance integrations which then become “routine” operations.
One of our customers shared with us just how difficult it was for them (before they started using Octopai of course) to migrate data from SSRS to Tableau. With automated data lineage, thousands of endless fields of information can be processed immediately, thereby eliminating tedious busywork, streamlining the process, and saving months of wasted resources.
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Automated Data Lineage is Essential for Successful Data Teams
Automated data lineage enables better resource allocation for some BI teams. For others, it is essential to meeting crucial industry regulations.
One example is the lineage methods that the banking industry has adopted to comply with regulations put in place following the 2007 financial collapse. A key piece of legislation that emerged from that crisis was BCBS-239. It required banks to develop a data architecture that could support risk-management tools.
Not only did the banks need to implement these risk-measurement systems (which depend on metrics arriving from distinct data dictionary tools), they also needed to produce reports documenting their use. These reports required data lineage audits that were almost impossible to manually produce in a timely fashion.
Data lineage automation was the key for banks to pull information from a cloud data catalog and meet these standards.
Automated Data Lineage Enables Data Teams to Deliver Faster Results
In addition to compliance and risk management, data lineage can also fix even the most complex issues around daily BI operations that so many data teams encounter regularly. For example, the Israeli Department of Transportation needed to update its 7-digit license plate system because they ran out of numbers. To address this, the Department suggested increasing the numbers on new license plates from seven to eight. They then relayed that information to insurance companies.
Insurance companies soon discovered there was no central system for recording license plates; making changes to every field in every spreadsheet would be a massive undertaking. The estimated minimum amount of time to complete this project was 6 months!
Once again, automated data lineage alongside data dictionary tools enabled them to tackle this challenge swiftly and accurately. Instead of having to spend months of tedious busywork, the BI team used Octopai’s data lineage for impact analysis, and resolved the problem in only 3 days!
Automated Data Lineage in Tandem With Other Automated BI & Analytics Tools Brings Results
Data lineage is a powerful tool with many useful business applications, but when it operates together with data lineage, business glossary, and data dictionary tools, we’re looking at a whole new ball game. A centralized platform, like Octopai’s automated BI intelligence platform, that comprises these rich capabilities working together, is key to modern BI & Analytics teams looking for deeper, more accurate insights instantly.
