Enterprise-level businesses have tons of data to manage and organize. With an enterprise data catalog, businesses can have a single source of truth for data governance and data analysis. An enterprise data catalog will give your teams the information they need to work with data effectively and maximize its value. In this blog, we’ll explore the benefits of having an enterprise data catalog and how you can put them to use in your organization.

A brief introduction

Organizations generate and collect more data than ever. Without effective data governance and organization in place, you get data silos, workflow bottlenecks, and ineffective use of valuable data. With a comprehensive solution like an Enterprise Data Catalog, data can be more effectively managed and governed. Before diving into the benefits, let’s talk about exactly what we mean by an Enterprise Data Catalog.

What is an Enterprise Data Catalog? (EDC)

An enterprise data catalog is a centralized repository for data assets. But more than this, an enterprise data catalog organizes data using metadata to give it context, allowing users to understand and properly utilize the data. The metadata contains information that includes data definitions, source of origin, lineage, descriptions, data owners, and more. 

In short, an enterprise data catalog serves as an organization’s data encyclopedia. Users can access your Enterprise Data Catalog to search, discover, and share data assets with ease. This improves data governance while also driving data-driven insights, analytics, and reporting.

An enterprise data catalog is a centralized repository that organizes and manages an organization's data assets based on their metadata. It provides a single point of reference for discovering, understanding, and using data at scale. There are several reasons why an organization needs an enterprise data catalog:

Data Discovery and Accessibility: An enterprise data catalog makes it easier to find the right data asset through an intuitive user interface and self-service data search and discovery, saving time and effort spent looking for data

Data Governance and Compliance: It helps establish and enforce policies and standards for data governance and use, ensuring data privacy, security, and compliance with regulations

Data Quality Management: It provides a centralized repository for data quality rules, enabling the monitoring of data quality over time and the identification of issues that need to be addressed

Resource Optimization: It allows organizations to eliminate duplicate assets, stale or unused data, and unnecessary data processing, leading to better resource utilization, lesser storage space, and a cleaner data landscape

Decision-Making: By providing easily accessible information about data usage and accuracy, an enterprise data catalog provides valuable guidance for making informed decisions based on data assets

Benefits of an Enterprise Catalog

Now we know what an Enterprise Data Catalog is, but what are the benefits? The benefits of EDCs are numerous, and it’s worth diving deeper to take a look at some of the major advantages. Let’s start with improved data governance.

1. Improved data governance

Improved data governance is a significant benefit of having an enterprise data catalog. Data governance encompasses various areas of data management, including the security, integrity, and accessibility of data. An enterprise data catalog naturally improves these areas by making data more organized and searchable.

Acting as a centralized hub for data, data owners and stewards can more easily be accountable and take ownership of their data assets. This makes it easier for them to ensure data is accurate and consistent while also adhering to compliance measures and industry regulations. Since the EDC contains data lineage metadata, it also makes it easy to keep an audit trail for the origins of data and changes made to data.

An enterprise data catalog also makes it easier to identify sensitive data, so access controls can be more easily assigned. This helps organizations mitigate the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches.

2. Enhanced data discovery and collaboration

Another significant benefit of enterprise data catalogs is enhanced data discovery and collaboration. EDCs make it much simpler for teams to search and access data assets relevant to their analytics. It helps to democratize data so users don’t have to constantly route requests through the data team to the information they need.

Since data is less siloed and more organized, it also makes it easier for departments to collaborate and share data. Since the EDC acts as a central source of truth, there are fewer errors, duplicates, and discrepancies in data across departments and teams.

In short, when everyone has a better understanding of the data available in an organization, discovery, and collaboration both become simpler for all. A clear and accessible overview of data ensures the right people are getting the right data at the right time.

3. Accelerates data integration processes

Having an enterprise data catalog set up will streamline your processes for data integration and data migrations. Typically, data integration requires you to locate your data from various disparate sources to ensure you integrate all of your data assets. When all of your data assets and metadata are centralized, this process is greatly accelerated.

Data engineers can quickly identify the data they need for data integration, evaluate its quality, and integrate it into new processes or workflows. Since all of the data is in a single repository, this also makes it easier to eliminate data errors and inconsistencies as the data is integrated or migrated to a new location.

Another major time-consuming task of data migration is identifying which data should be migrated and what can be left behind. With an EDC, you can quickly identify the relevant data that should be carried over and data that is no longer needed.

Overall, the speed and efficiency of data integration and migration processes can be significantly improved with an enterprise data catalog in place. Along with increasing speed, it also helps to ensure the accuracy and quality of data that is being integrated.

4. Enables data-driven decision making

Of course, when data discovery is more accessible and democratized, you enable data-driven decision making for all users. Users can more easily analyze data and create reports that allow them to use data to its maximum potential.

Without a centralized enterprise data catalog, users may find it difficult to sift through the various different data sources to find useful information to base decisions on. Additionally, non-technical users may find these processes impossible and will need to rely on the data team for insights.

When all of your users and decision-makers can access quality, relevant data, they can identify trends, patterns, and correlations that might not have been accessible before. As mentioned before, this also enables more collaboration and sharing between departments, further improving decision-making and empowering users to truly leverage the power of your organization’s data assets.

5. Supports scalability

As your organization grows, your data environment needs to grow with you. An enterprise data catalog can help support scalability, making it easier to integrate or migrate data as you phase in new systems.

As discussed in an earlier point, an enterprise data catalog makes it much simpler to integrate your data with data management tools. This allows you to scale your data analytics capabilities and data storage needs along with your growth.

Whether your systems or your user base is expanding, an enterprise data catalog will help support those stages of growth at any level. Without one, your data can get disorganized and quality and dip as you take your business to the next level.

How an Enterprise Catalog works

As we’ve learned, an enterprise data catalog serves as an organization’s centralized repository of data assets. These assets are organized and categorized with metadata, which includes context and information about each asset. This provides a clearer view of data assets, making it more usable, searchable, and accurate.

To implement an enterprise data catalog, the first step is to extract your data assets from all of your data sources and integrate this data into your EDC. This also involves extracting metadata so the data is as usable and searchable as possible.

Data catalog tools are the best way to go about this. With data catalog software, you can automate many of the processes to create a comprehensive enterprise data catalog. This accelerates the process of implementing your EDC and minimizes downtime as you switch over to using the new system.

Once you have an enterprise data catalog in place, you will need to help ensure the new system is adopted by your users. Processes will also need to be in place to assign accountability to data stewards and ensure ongoing maintenance of your data catalog.

With these measures and processes in place, your organization will be able to leverage your new enterprise data catalog and make the most of your data assets like never before.

Enterprise Catalog challenges & considerations

While an enterprise data catalog can bring immense value to any organization, there are several challenges and considerations that must be kept in mind. Some of these challenges may include:

• Data Privacy and Security - While having data more searchable and accessible is a big benefit of EDCs, you also need to ensure you have data governance policies in place to protect sensitive data from unauthorized users.
• Data Quality - From the beginning, you should make sure you only integrate accurate, consistent data into your enterprise data catalog. Furthermore, you should make sure to monitor processes to ensure quality standards continue to be high.
• Maintaining the Catalog - Catalog maintenance is a must. Make sure you stay on top of your data catalog and update your processes and tools as necessary to keep up with the ever-evolving data landscape.
• User Adoption - Make sure users are trained on the new processes, so you can foster a data-driven culture. While an EDC should make data more accessible to everyone, it’s important to still provide support while people are getting used to things.
• Choosing the Right Solution - There is a wide variety of data catalog tools. Choosing the one that is right for your organization is a crucial step in the implementation process. A data catalog tool like Secoda can help ensure your EDC implementation goes smoothly.

Best practices for an Enterprise Catalog

Here are some best practices to consider for enterprise data catalogs:

• Establish clear ownership and responsibilities - Each department can be the steward of their own data assets after implementing an enterprise data catalog. Ensure these roles and responsibilities are clearly outlined and defined from the beginning. 
• Keep the catalog up-to-date - Remember to keep your catalog updated with the most updated and accurate data assets. Processes like these can be automated with the right data management tools.
• Ensure data quality - Remember to have processes in place for data quality checks. This will ensure your data stays accurate and consistent.
• Standardize metadata - Use a data dictionary to standardize your data definitions, this way, all of your users understand your metadata and how to use and label your data assets.
• Encourage collaboration - Promote cross-functional collaboration and sharing of data knowledge to increase understanding and use of the catalog.
• Measure success - Define key performance indicators for success and make sure to keep track of them after implementing your enterprise data catalog.

Try Secoda for Free

As mentioned, it’s best to choose a quality data catalog tool if you want your implementation to be successful. For that, there’s Secoda. Along with numerous other features, Secoda offers an AI-powered data catalog too. Using Secoda, you can easily automate data discovery, documentation, and governance. Secoda automatically ingests metadata from all your data sources and generates documentation, removing the manual process of creating documentation and helping your team be more productive. If you’re ready to see everything Secoda has to offer, try it out for free today.