Why Data Lineage is King in Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence & Analytics: It’s a hard knock life for these guys

The job description sounds great, right?  It usually goes something like this: “Using state-of-the-art tools and techniques, leveraging your creativity and understanding of business operations and data structures to combine data from disparate sources to generate reports, dashboards, and other deliverables to provide actionable business insights to key stakeholders. Other duties as assigned.” Easy peasy, right? 


We beg to differ.


That last sentence is tricky. “Other duties?” That’s often code for “working nights and weekends tracking down bugs and data errors, taking the blame if the data doesn’t give the ‘right’ answer, and being held accountable when unrealistic timelines aren’t met.”


When BI and Analytics teams lack access to the tools required to be able to do their jobs efficiently, they end up spending most of their time on manual data mapping. This wastes valuable time that could be spent generating insights to help the business make better decisions and grow. BI teams hold a wealth of information that allows companies to effectively determine the most strategic way to move forward and succeed. 


This is why a data lineage tool, namely an automated data lineage tool, is king for Business Intelligence teams. 


Data lineage powers BI insights

The modern enterprise lives or dies by the quality of its data and its ability to extract meaningful insights from it. The past helps illuminate a company’s future and learnings derived from previous campaigns advise accurate strategy. This is where data lineage comes into play.


By incorporating an automated data lineage tool in their wheelhouse, BI professionals can make more informed decisions by viewing the entire journey of their data. Data lineage enables teams to successfully handle regulatory compliance, system upgrades & migrations, M&A (system consolidation), reporting inaccuracies and business changes – all much more quickly and accurately than if done manually. This saves  BI teams valuable time and effort, so they dedicate their time and focus on analyzing and optimizing the data. 


By combining different data streams in one platform, data teams will receive a clearer picture of the information. As data flows from the data warehouse to analysis tools without any type of interruption, it provides better insights in a shorter period of time. This saves BI teams from checking all different systems and comparing data found. A singular platform also limits the number of potential errors since all information stems from one source. 

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Automated data lineage expedites impact analysis 

In terms of impact analysis, automated data lineage streamlines the process and allows BI teams to identify any errors or discrepancies. While completing this process manually can take a few months, automated data lineage only takes a matter of days. Once BI professionals can visualize the complete journey of the data, they can understand the effect that certain changes will make. This helps BI teams determine which data is essential and if an alteration is put into place, which data sets will be affected. 


Business Intelligence + data lineage helps companies win  

With data lineage in their toolkit, BI teams can view the entire journey of their organization’s data and plan accordingly for the future. This will promote more strategic decision-making and position the organization for success. Data lineage allows BI professionals to easily spot mistakes and learn from these misjudgments. This will save data teams time and energy so they can focus their efforts on other projects. As more businesses realize what they can achieve when they implement data lineage, they will come out on top.

Is your organization struggling to get full, accurate data lineage?
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