Welcome back to our MANTA Cases series!
A large company with messy data governance and decisions made based on data of dubious origins? Not with MANTA! Read more to learn how using data lineage streamlined an organization’s reporting process and made its business decisions more trusted than ever.
Self-Service for Everyone?
Self-service is a crucial part of business intelligence, and when used right it saves organizations tons of money, time, and human resources. All you need in order to enable functional and accurate self-service is a robust data governance solution, et voilà! All your metadata is there. So when you need to make a report, you build it based on the data you have found, you present it at a company meeting, and you call it a day. But let’s take off those rose-tinted glasses. There is data and then there is data. And that’s what our customer had to deal with. Some employees were generating reports based on all the data they could find, often using untrusted data. The upshot of the process was the results that were being questioned in meetings and inconsistent reports presented by various departments and managers, making them go back to the drawing board—spending days validating the results, which also led to generating duplicate data sets and reports. Sadly, presenting such a report is shooting yourself in the foot. Not only does it undermine trust in the data presented but it also calls your competence into question.
Certify It!
To address the issue, the company decided that all management reports should be based solely on certified data sets, especially in terms of customer data, product data, and sales data. Certified data sets are those that have been assigned to specific owners who check their accuracy and give the rest of the team the green light to use them for reports. There are a few conditions that must be met for a data set to be validated such as all attributes must have a proper label; similar data sets should not be duplicated but consolidated; calculations should be validated against the DAX expression in PowerBI, their primary reporting platform; and the origins of the data should be clear. And here’s when things get more complicated.
Automated Data Lineage to the Rescue
Having certified data is great. But in a large, dynamic environment with tangled data connections, even the smallest modification makes the set change its ways. Every time it happens, the appropriate team should be notified about the change, the data set should be automatically decertified, and it should go through the certification process again. That’s when our customer had to call in reinforcements. How could they detect such changes without spending endless hours on manual data flow analysis? With automated data lineage! With MANTA, the team has lineage details linked to all the data sets, providing an automated way of defining which data sets need to be decertified and information on what the certification path looked like up to the final report. The developers can explore and identify the changes made to the environment every time they open MANTA, thanks to the current and past revisions feature that tracks what has changed since the data was last exported to the metadata management solution.
Regained Trust
Thanks to MANTA and its automated lineage capabilities, our customer significantly increased the value of the data governance project, regained trust in their data sets, increased the transparency of their data pipelines, and significantly improved their processes to become a truly data-driven organization. Implementing MANTA’s solution turned out to be beneficial not only for business users and decision-makers but also for developers, saving them tons of time both on manual data flow analysis and evaluating the credibility of their reports, which allowed them to shorten the time to project delivery by spending time on actual work rather than investigating issues.
Are you ready to take your data governance projects to the next level? Schedule a demo or send us a message at manta@getmanta.com, and let’s see how MANTA can make your life easier.