The last decade has been an important one for enterprise data lineage. Data lineage management, once a time-consuming process of manual data tracking used only in times of crisis, has been transformed by automation into an essential tool for making informed business decisions.
With all the progress that has been made in converting the massive amounts of data available to modern corporations into useable information already, what else is on the horizon? Let’s take a look at what data lineage automation will look like in 2020.
Enterprise Data Lineage Becomes Ubiquitous
Business leaders are becoming increasingly aware that data lineage mapping is not just a useful tool to trace the flow of data, it is a vital function of running an efficient business. As such, the use of data lineage automation tools such as Octopai has skyrocketed.
Octopai is able to locate all data items defined by different metadata descriptions throughout multi-source data environments, enabling organizations to find the common origins of this data, and get a full understanding of the pathways the data has undergone to this point. This allows for better comprehension of and control over data assets, reduced report discrepancies and overall improved data intelligence across the organization.
Curious to learn more about Data Lineage?
Be sure to check out our white paper "Advanced Data Lineage"
Read the White Paper
Automation Allows for Faster Data Analysis
Automation enables modern data lineage analysis because it allows business intelligence teams to perform these tasks at speeds that were unheard of before. The modern company has data that is mobile, broken, transformed and subject to inaccurate interpretations. Sifting through this data by hand takes teams hours at a minimum, and weeks to complete even mid-sized tasks.
Companies with automated data lineage are able to get the full story behind their data, without having to waste hours and hours on manual data mapping, which can have a significant impact on your data intelligence team’s bottom line. Every single automated lineage search can save around six hours on manual mapping for an analyst. For one company, this translated into a monthly savings of over $15,000.
Metadata Management Automation Increases Accuracy
One of the biggest challenges facing data analytics teams is how to reconcile data that arrives from different sources which contains different metadata lineage information. Well, Octopai users are able to get the full story behind their data across systems and also auto-refresh of all their metadata. That’s right, companies using Octopai will be able to automate the refresh function of their metadata as often as they choose.
Data lineage is not possible without metadata management, and automation streamlines this process and produces more accurate results. With a data lineage solution that can automatically discover and then stitch together metadata arriving from disparate sources, analysts can create a more useful picture of where data is arriving from and use it to guide better decisions.
New Advances Enable New Data Lineage Opportunities
The more business data lineage automation advances, the more businesses will be able to sort and analyze data in ways that will allow them to take deep dives into the data available and generate reports with increased value.
These improved data lineage solutions will allow data analysts to generate a full picture of the data held by an organization and then dynamically update as new data is added. Business intelligence teams can create compelling interpretations of what a dataset means for a company by having the complete lineage illustration available at their fingerprints.
Regular analysis generated by data lineage automation software ensures that the final product is as accurate as can be. Online analytics processing will further enable advanced analytics as these technologies continue to improve through 2020 and beyond that.
These tools will help save businesses money, ensure compliance and guarantee greater accuracy in generating meaningful data lineage mapping. As data privacy regulations are predicted to tighten over the next decade (CCPA, for example), data lineage will become an even more vital part of running an efficient and transparent company.
