How Business Users and Executives Can Benefit from Automated Data Lineage

While technical users—data engineers, data analysts, data scientists, and data stewards– appreciate the value of a data lineage solution, business users are often at a loss when it comes to its benefits. Two main factors contribute to this status: one is the misconception that data lineage is a technical capability; unless you are familiar with the nuts and bolts of data management, it has nothing to do with business use cases. Secondly, most data lineages are built manually or with tools that require a lot of human intervention and don’t provide enough business related insight for the business users and executives to access and care about. 

Orion Governance’s Enterprise Information Intelligence Graph (EIIG) was created to change this sad status quo. With its most automated and detailed data lineage solution, business users can realize that leveraging data lineage can be surprisingly easy and beneficial for them. Here’s why:

Business-user friendly

EIIG’s data lineage solution visualizes in a knowledge graph both horizontal and vertical lineage, including a view of how data travels from the business perspective. Since EIIG maps business terms with technical assets, business users can easily understand the lifecycle of data without any IT expertise. What is more, EIIG provides different levels of lineage for different personas. If a business user is interested in only an organizational, business, or domain-specific view of the data flow, he or she can just choose the view according to his or her need. In addition to this EIIG offers Wingman, a Generative AI component. Wingman allows business users to use natural language querying to answer questions when it comes to lineage or KPIs.

Data discovery made easy

EIIG automatically harvests metadata from more than 70 technologies and intelligently stitches it to provide both intra- and inter-system connectivity. By incorporating ontologies, business glossaries and integrating with a dynamic data catalog, EIIG enables business users to easily find out what data they have no matter what the technology landscape is, be it the mainframe, or programming languages such as Python and Java, by clicking on the business terms right in the data lineage knowledge graph. They can also find out information such as the business or transformation logic of the data assets. EIIG provides a single pane view of information flow that is technology, vendor and platform agnostic.

Trustworthy decisions

EIIG propagates trust in data through data lineage. Business users and executives can gain trust in the data they are using: they can find out who the owner of certain data assets is, whether the data is certified, and how data quality scores change throughout the data journey. With this data transparency, they become more confident that their business decisions are based on accurate and trustworthy information.

Enhanced regulatory compliance, data privacy

One of the key requirements for regulatory compliance is end-to-end data traceability. EIIG breaks down data silos and provides a detailed record of data flows, transformations, and usage throughout the enterprise data landscape to ensure compliance. Also, by automatic tagging of sensitive data such as PII, EIIG not only helps protect data privacy but also facilitate the compliance with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA and CCPA. With EIIG, compliance officers can rest assured that they can meet both internal and external auditors’ requirements without unproductive manual efforts. 

Impact analysis

An essential part of Orion Governance’s data lineage offering is near real-time impact analysis. Business users can perform such an analysis by clicking a data element in the lineage graph and immediately understand what downstream systems such as a report will be impacted if a change is made there. Understanding of such dependencies not only improve business users’ data literacy but also make them more aware of and proactive about the effect of changes or issues in data sources, transformations, or updates. As a result, they can improve their risk management and decision-making. 

Collaboration facilitated

EIIG’s data lineage capability offers detailed visual documentation that promotes collaboration among the business and executive users, working with data, as it provides a common understanding of data sources and transformations. Collaboration between the IT, data governance, and business teams is also boosted since they can communicate on the basis of this shared data lineage.

To sum up, data lineage as a foundational element for effective data management, does not only benefit the technical users but also the business community by providing data transparency and usability and promoting enhance regulatory compliance, trustworthy decision-making, and cross-team collaboration.