Keeping your data pipeline healthy is critical in today’s data-driven world. After all, if you’re going to stay in compliance with ever-changing regulations or use data to make better business decisions, you have to be able to trust your data.  But, that’s often easier said than done. One of the key data lineage benefits that can help you keep your pipeline healthy is data accuracy. In this post, we’ll break down how automated data lineage can help you maintain data accuracy by eliminating your data blind spots once and for all. 

How Data Blind Spots Impede Accuracy  

Data accuracy is a critical component of building trust in your data. After all, without trust in your data, how can you rely on it to make informed business decisions? Inaccurate data can lead to poor decisions with costly consequences, which is why data accuracy must be a priority in all areas of your organization. 

There are several clear use cases that demand data accuracy – regulatory compliance, cloud migrations, better business intelligence, and more. At the same time, many companies are head-to-head with huge amounts of data siloed in many disparate systems, making it challenging to maintain a healthy data pipeline. 

For example, one survey from Forrester and Airtable found that large organizations use an average of 367 software apps and systems to manage their workflows, which encourages multiple sources of truth and hides critical data. A separate study from Workday discovered that nearly half of CFOs (49%) say that their biggest gap is the ability to execute with accurate, timely data that drives informed and quick decisions. 

Another problem organizations are facing is a massive amount of time, money, and manual resources spent conducting manual root cause analysis due to data pipeline breakages. With poor accuracy, it becomes significantly more difficult to catch problems before they occur (impact analysis) and to find out where they stemmed from once they do (root cause analysis). 

Data Lineage is the Missing Piece in Data Accuracy 

Data is the undercurrent that flows through your entire business. As mentioned earlier, if that undercurrent is riddled with inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and errors, it can lead to poor business decisions with real-world implications. 

To achieve data accuracy and restore trust in data, many organizations are turning to data lineage. Data lineage is able to create a comprehensive map of all of your data so you can easily see dependencies and missing or broken tables, and better monitor which elements should be updated, archived, or purged. 

For example, MANTA’s data lineage solution scans your entire data environment to create a comprehensive map of your data flows and dependencies. When you see where potential errors lie at a high level, you can begin to drill down into the missing or broken areas to address whether or not the data is accurate. You’ll get a deeper look into your data environment, uncover data blind spots, and eliminate inconsistencies standing in the way of data accuracy. 

MANTA also has powerful capabilities that can help you maintain the health of your data pipeline – both when things go wrong, and when you want to make sure they don’t. Among MANTA’s most powerful capabilities are its ability to conduct impact analysis, which determines the effects a planned change will have on your data environment, and root cause analysis, which isolates the root cause of a data pipeline problem. 

You might be wondering “Why should I care? Wouldn’t mapping the data just send us looking for trouble?” While that may be an initial concern, data lineage can save time and money, effectively freeing up engineers to focus on the projects that will have the largest impact. 

For example, automated data lineage can save engineers up to 40% of the time normally spent running manual impact analysis. MANTA Scanners allows development teams to perform instant and accurate impact analysis to accelerate software testing and predict the impacts a change could have in other areas of the environment – all while encouraging collaboration among data users.

Learn About Other Data Lineage Trends

The benefits of data lineage don’t stop at data accuracy. To learn more about the ways you can expect data lineage to augment your business, download our 2023 Data Lineage Outlook: Buying Factors and Trends. You’ll learn eight trends and buying factors for you to consider when looking for a data lineage tool. 

Get your copy below to learn how to harness these trends to unlock the full potential of your data flows.