How data governance creates an effective data supply chain

Your data ecosystem should get the right data to the right people at the right time. To do this, teams need to adopt a data governance strategy that builds trust and brings visibility to the data supply chain.

Transparency helps teams make critical business decisions, and that’s a key benefit of data.world’s partnership with Fivetran.

Many organizations face data supply chain challenges

Data engineers spend significant time setting up pipelines and fulfilling data access requests. Data analysts hunt for the data they need along with context to figure out whether they can trust the data they’ve found. Moving along the data supply chain can sometimes feel chaotic due to challenges like:

Low to no visibility into data: If you can’t answer questions like “what data do we have?” and “where can we find x data set?” it’s difficult to bring the right data into the pipeline for analysis.
Low trust in data and reports: Lack of context and understanding of data assets leads to low-quality downstream reports and impedes teams that need to make data-driven decisions.
Data and knowledge silos: Restrictive policies and lack of governed self-service for data access leads to bottlenecks in the data supply chain.

Fortunately, leveraging data.world’s enterprise data catalog with Fivetran makes it easy for anyone in an organization to find, understand, trust and use data wherever it lives.

Unite your data ecosystem with data governance

Data governance strategies establish the underlying rules of engagement with data and provide a trusted foundation for interacting with it. Central to that is enabling end-to-end visibility across your data ecosystem, increasing participation in an inclusive and collaborative data culture, and empowering teams with context.

Increase data visibility

When Fivetran centralizes and automates your ELT processes, it also shares metadata about your data from start to finish through data.world to give your team visibility into the changes made. Making this “in flight” information about your data available to users in a data catalog, along with metadata about your connectors, sources and destinations, provides that end-to-end visibility needed for effective data governance.

In the data.world enterprise data catalog, a collection of Fivetran information and data resources houses data context and resources, such as a Fivetran Google Sheets database schema for orders load resource

Build a culture of trust and collaboration around data

By enabling your organization to self-serve information and access relevant data according to policies and roles, you can foster more collaboration and participation in maintaining your data — increasing time to insights in the process. You can have discussions with teammates and data subject matter experts about certain assets and suggest changes to metadata, status and more that admins can review and approve to enrich your data assets with more context.

Break down data and knowledge silos

Additionally, you can consolidate metadata from all components of your data ecosystem in your data catalog and make relevant information available for your data analysts to search while protecting sensitive information. Gain more transparency into your data and enrich your understanding by using data.world’s lineage viewer, Eureka Explorer^TM, powered by a knowledge graph that helps you extend your knowledge of connections and relationships in your data by doing that work for you.

With Explorer lineage for a retail_order table, the data lineage goes from a sql_server online_order database table through a Fivetran connector to a Snowflake staging database stg_retail_order database table and so forth to another Snowflake database, then simultaneously to a dbt source, dbt seed, PowerBI workspace, and a Tableau data source.

Removing bottlenecks with data governance

Penguin Random House UK, a joint customer, faced challenges within their data supply chain where bottlenecks slowed down access to data assets and knowledge. The team consolidated their data pipelines with Fivetran’s connectors and centralized access to data assets in data.world’s data catalog to make important business decisions about reaching their target audience.

“Imagine managing books without title information, author data, cover images, royalties or number of chapters. That's what it's like managing data without a catalog. Now, information that once took our data scientists a week to find is discoverable in seconds on data.world.”

Rupal Sumaria, the Head of Data Governance, Penguin Random House UK

Keep your data supply chain running smoothly

When your entire data ecosystem works together, you can create a more efficient data supply chain to reduce bottlenecks and risk.

Making metadata about your Fivetran data integrations available to your teams gives them a more complete view of your data lineage. You can even use information about your Fivetran connectors to identify issues and improvements within your data supply chain.

For example, you can reference policies in data.world to proactively enforce sensitive data policies within your data pipeline. Through automation, centralization and end-to-end visibility, you can build a data culture through data governance to keep your data supply chain running smoothly.

If you’re interested in learning more about Fivetran and data.world’s seamless integration, watch our recent webinar!

Hear from data.world at this year's Modern Data Stack Conference on April 4-5, 2023. Register with the discount code MDSCON-DATAWORLDBLOG to get 20 percent off by March 31, 2023!