erwin

Fig 2 - erwin Data Marketplace

In the context of data governance, erwin Data Intelligence carries out data lineage, impact analysis, data profiling, merge/matching data cleansing, and monitoring, supported by a data catalog of the ingested metadata collected and enriched with technical and business context from across a company’s data landscape.

Data owners can be assigned and the product supports workflow for data stewards, who curate and bring together technical assets with business assets such as business terms, policies, rules and more, manage data classifications, and manage requests for data access. Asset discovery and collaboration, including the recently released erwin Data Marketplace, provide consumer-like capabilities to allow end users to analyze, compare and share datasets, AI models and other data assets, commenting on and ranking the quality of data sources in a similar way that they might rank and comment on movies or products they have purchased on-line. Automated data value scoring for reliability and value, also leverages these user ratings and reviews, data quality scores and data governance curation completeness to help build a picture of the trustworthiness of specific data and lay the groundwork for potential monetization. Currently the software runs on-premise and as a software as a service with the same capabilities. The software will also have a hosted offering in 2024.

The software has automatic data asset discovery, speeding up the onboarding of data assets using techniques including fuzzy logic. The software can recognize a business term like a social security number, and can find all columns with that term based on column definitions, presenting that to a data steward. The product has a number of visual displays such as knowledge graphs and mind maps to allow end users to easily visualize their data. Data elements can be classified as sensitive for personally identifiable information purposes. Data lineage assessment can be carried out right down to table and column level. Customers can define policies, regulations and processes and set up workflow processes to evaluate and authorize changes.

Data governance is more than just populating a stand-alone data catalog and business glossary. The governance process extends to data quality, and is not a one-off exercise but something that requires constant monitoring. erwin has long been the de-facto standard for data modelling, and so many customers may wish to use an integrated suite of tools, from modelling through to data quality through to catalog and marketplace, rather than dealing with a series of tools from different vendors and having to interface these together. The software automates many of the time-consuming aspects associated with data discovery, quality assessment, business contextualization, governance guidance and organizational data literacy enablement and data accessibility.

The Bottom Line

erwin Data Intelligence is a full-function data governance product that can also leverage the proven erwin data modelling tool. It competes with other such products like Collibra and Alation, and should be considered for companies wishing to embark on enterprise-wide data governance.