The root cause of a lot of the distrust that often exists between IT and the rest of the business often comes down to the quality of the data being served up in any report. Much of the data that goes into those reports is still manually collected. That leaves a lot of room for error, especially when data sets residing in multiple applications conflict with each other.
To help bring some order to that chaos, while at the same time restoring faith in the data being presented, ASG Software Solutions today unveiled Enterprise Data Intelligence, a tool that automatically discovers the relationships between data sets and specific business processes. Once the relationships are discovered, Enterprise Data Intelligence can be used to document those relationships. That metadata can then be exposed to other applications using a RESTful application programming interface (API).
David Downing, executive vice president of product management and marketing for ASG Software Solutions, says Enterprise Data Intelligence was initially developed to help IT organizations deal with any number of compliance issues. Regulations in any number of vertical industries are increasingly requiring IT organizations to be able to document the lineage of any piece of data used to make a business decision.
But as part of that process, Downing notes, organizations are also finding that the quality of the data being used to make those decisions is improving. In that context, Downing says, Enterprise Data Intelligence creates a new data governance and business applications model. As the quality of the underlying data improves, so does the accuracy of the applications that make use of that data.
Business executives often doesn’t trust the data coming out of the IT department because it conflicts with their experience or, for that matter, what they know to be true. After some investigation, the organization usually finds the data in question has been updated in one application, but not another. Murphy’s Law being what it is, the application being used to generate a particular report is the one that has not been updated.
A new tool may not immediately solve all those process problems. But it does begin to put in place a discipline around how data is organized that not only wastes less time, but more importantly, restores confidence in the business value of IT itself.