Power

Next Generation

of
Governance. Now.
Automation & Continuous

Partici-
Improvement for Active
Governance

pation
Alation Data Governance

Data is Exploding
Internet users generate about 2.5
quintillion bytes of data each day,
and 95% of businesses cite the need
to manage unstructured data as a
problem for their business.
Source: techjury.net
Alation Data Governance | Introduction
More than ever, businesses are pivoting to a data-driven
culture based on rapid access to trusted information and
regulatory compliance. That’s sharpening the focus on
data governance as a critical management function.
Vendors across the governance space make similar
claims about their platforms. Not all approaches are alike,
however. The differences go much deeper than features
and capabilities. How you achieve robust governance
matters—and so does the role of your governance solu-
tion in generating business value.
When choosing a partner, it pays to understand the
different approaches and how they can impact you and
your users.
Authority-driven or people-centered?
Mindset makes a difference.
Traditional data governance platforms grew
out of the financial crises of the early 2000s.
The governance mindset was one of control
and authority—and rightly so.
The starting point was a restrictive, process-
driven data stewardship model, expressed
in locked-down data protected by rigid
workflows and permissions. Over time,
these platforms have become more open to
encourage adoption but remain rooted in
that insular, top-down philosophy and narrow
focus on stewardship. As a result, businesses
often find that adoption does not meet
expectations.
Alation has always seen it differently. Our
platform grew out of tools built to serve
data analysts (the users of data). Immediate
business value, inclusiveness and ease of use
are foundational because these empower
users and encourage widespread adoption.
Questions to ask:
1. Does the solution support a wide array of capabilities include federated,
non-invasive, and active governance?
2. Does the solution empower users or restrict them?
3. Is it designed for self-service use?
Alation Data Governance | Philosophy/Mindset
This fundamental philosophical difference takes
governance in a different direction. Making
governance a shared part of the organization’s
pivot to data-driven culture shifts its emphasis
to quality and continuous improvement.
This is why Alation approaches data governance
differently. We see power in participation across
the business. The mindset is people-centric:
data that’s accessible and both useful and
usable, with governance that’s open, highly
automated and driven by the community
with data steward participation. Rapid, broad
adoption driven by business value is at the
center of our social, collaborative approach to
governance and data management. The user,
not the process, comes first.
“The typical command-and-
control approach fails precisely
because it leaves individuals
frustrated and disengaged.”
– Dave Menninger, SVP & Research Director, Ventana Research
Make data accessible because that’s
where the value lies
When Alation is implemented, it immediately
provides valuable context and insights such
as which data is most popular and who the
top users are. This provides a real reason to
continue the adoption of the most trusted
data as a business tool. The result is a virtuous
circle that increases ROI as adoption grows: the
more users who access the catalog, the more
valuable it becomes. Attracting users who want
to be more effective in their jobs is why Alation
drives higher and speedier adoption than other
solutions.
With Alation’s integrated access to both
metadata and its underlying real data for
exploration, reuse and sharing, analysts can
not only find and understand data more easily,
but also query it and explore it all from a single,
user-friendly interface.
The business implications of this integrated
capability are significant. Traditional governance
solutions do not provide access to query data.
They offer a way to find the data by allowing
access to metadata, but it’s then necessary to
use another tool to actually explore it. This puts
a drag on productivity and business value.
Alation also allows analysts to share their
queries, best practices and comments, and see
governance in context. Users gain the ability
to surface policies at the point at which data is
being consumed so they are enforced correctly
without the need for additional steps.
“You can pull together a policy
which encompasses all the right
things to do at the right time. But
if you aren’t able to share that
information, and get buy-in and
execution from everyone who
is accountable, then you are not
taking the right approach.”
– Amy Keelty, Information Strategy & Governance Director,
American Family Insurance

Questions to ask:
1. What is the time-to-value for the platform?

2. Does the solution leverage intelligent automation and natural language for ease of use?

3. What are data consumers able to do on their own, and what requires the involvement of
the governance team?

4. Do analysts require multiple tools and workflows to accomplish their tasks?

Alation Data Governance | Accessibility of Data & Policies

Data is not static.
Governance shouldn’t be, either.
Data governance evolution is central to the
Alation model, and an important part of
generating business value. Governance grows
out of participation by formalizing what already
exists—the governance roles and practices that
form organically with data use and sharing.
By making governance dynamic and inclusive, a
cycle of continuous improvement is established
that empowers users and enhances the
usefulness of data, not just its control—active,
rather than imposed, governance.
A key part of continuous improvement is the
ability to audit in order to monitor compliance
and measure progress. With Alation, this
intelligence is built into the platform through
Alation Data Governance | Continuous Improvement
Alation Analytics, an automated out-of-box
analytics data mart. It provides an essential
capability that would have to be built from
scratch with some vendors’ solutions.
Alation Analytics comes with audit query
templates as well as support for the creation
of custom queries, reports, and dashboards
using any business intelligence tool. It is self-
managed, meaning that it self-populates,
updates autonomously and requires zero
maintenance from the governance team.
More to explore:
Whitepaper: Active Data Governance
Methodology: Using a people-first approach
to avoid failed governance programs
Collaboration and workflow management
should be easy.
Alation makes collaborative data use simple.
Users can have conversations, publish, share
and even work together on the same query.
It’s the kind of dynamic, interactive experience
familiar to any social media user.
Traditional governance platforms typically
have complex and confusing user interfaces
that create a barrier to usage and adoption—
often usage is limited to expert data stewards
because business users find the solution too
difficult to work with. The Alation interface is
built for use by analysts and business users.
The technical complexity of the underlying
metadata model does not get in the way and
cause friction for the user. This is why Alation
adoption grows rapidly across the enterprise.
Ease of use helps, but it’s not everything.
Community participation demands widespread
adoption not only of the tools, but the data
itself. A tool that doesn’t help users get the
job done won’t drive adoption no matter how
simple it is.
Questions to ask:
1. Does the vendor have real-world data on adoption rates and time-to-value for its solution?
2. Does the solution enable direct collaboration outside the context of workflows?
3. Does the solution provide information about data usefulness? Can it identify experts within the
organization based on usage patterns?
Alation Data Governance | Collaboration & Workflow
Alation guides users, pointing them to
good data and away from bad data. Built-in
intelligence makes suggestions and provides
context to make data more discoverable,
and identifies top users and data to help with
curation and governance.
The platform provides out-of-box governance-
specific collaboration functionality,
conversations, notifications, and workflows that
can be completely configured via a simple point
and click. The process can easily be managed
by the existing governance team without the
need for Java development skills.
Alation is also interoperable with third-party
workflow engines, able to trigger business
process workflows in industry-leading products
like ServiceNow and Jira. This allows you to use
existing expertise and does not burden you with
hiring staff or consultants to support the non-
standard open-source workflow engine used by
some vendors.
Are you in the business of business,
or the business of governance?
Traditional governance solutions can be labor-
intensive and costly, with human intervention
and skill sets required at multiple points. If
the objective is getting more business value
from data (as opposed to data governance
and management), it can be difficult to justify
the necessary investment in personnel and
expertise.
Traditional governance solutions may be very
good at organizing data, but not practical for
understanding what is used most or by who—
it’s about controlling data, not working with it.
Vendors may claim to use automation, artificial
intelligence and machine learning to classify
data and add context, but the need to approve
business terms that the data is linked to before
it becomes useful creates a bottleneck.
Questions to ask:
1. What governance goals are you trying to
achieve? Is a rigid workflow actually required
or can you achieve the same result more
simply?
2. Does the solution have the flexibility to add
and modify definitions and keywords quickly
without compromising quality or control?
Alation Data Governance | Automation/Autonomy
Alation applies behavioral Intelligence and
automation to augment metadata with
additional information such as popularity,
top users, suggested terms, lexicon entries,
context-sensitive classification and discovery—
useful information that traditional solutions
require the governance team to generate (if it’s
available at all). This high degree of autonomy
and insight enables greater productivity for
stewards so they can engage in governance at
scale without the need for a large team.
Analyst productivity
improvement due to
shortened data discovery:
73% of total
benefits
Business user productivity
gains from self-service:
$584,182
Savings from faster onboarding
of new analysts:
$286,085
Source: Forrester TEI Study
Can a participatory model support
robust governance?
In Alation’s view, broad participation is Unlike other governance platforms, Alation
not contrary to good governance: quite stores and manages strategic governance
the opposite. Because it is a repository for policies while also enabling implementation
operational, regulatory, compliance and tools such as masks and row-level access
privacy policies open to all—and because it controls to be created and pushed into data
associates these policies with data at the point sources. The platform cross-links strategic
of consumption—the Alation platform helps and implementation policies, so governance
data consumers understand and apply the teams have an audit trail that shows how intent
appropriate policies consistently and correctly. matches actual application in specific data
sources.
This requires effective enforcement. Alation’s
active governance approach to policy
management and implementation is unique.
Traditional governance solutions provide a
storage repository for governance policies
but do not do anything with them to ensure
enforcement. Compliance becomes a separate
function that gets in the way. In sharp contrast,
Alation gives the governance team the ability to More to explore
actively enforce policy as the data is being used.
Whitepaper – The catalog is the
platform: Supplying trustworthy
and reliable data to support BI
and AI initiatives

Alation Data Governance | Policy Management & Implementation

Simple or complex?
Think about TCO and time to value.
Simplicity is the key to speed, adoption and cost
containment. Traditional governance platforms
can require months of work with consultants to
build out extensive metadata models, processes
and workflows that map to their product
architecture. They are often based on complex
technology stacks that require ongoing
involvement by a large IT and development
team to implement and maintain the solution,
including Java developers, Business Process
Model and Notation (BPMN) developers, and an
array of system administrators.
Alation offers intuitive configuration—a single
integrated platform with point-and-click, zero-
code setup that can be accomplished at a
fraction of the people costs. This is why Alation
implementations take a fraction of the time.
Questions to ask:
1. Does the solution include the data source connectors you
require, or does it rely on third parties?
2. What level of ongoing service and support is required?
3. How complex will the configuration be? How many
different products and vendors will be involved?
4. What are the licensing requirements?
5. Can the solution adapt to my IT environment?
Alation Data Governance | Complexity, Speed of Implementation & TCO
The Alation Professional Services Right Start
model brings the solution to go-live in 6-12
weeks, versus a typical engagement of 9-12
months for other vendors.
Deployment and cost of ownership also
vary widely among vendors. Some are giving
customers no option, migrating them to
software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the cloud and
abandoning existing products. Others require
customer hosting and multiple servers, which
can drive up IT costs for both infrastructure and
management.
Alation is simple and flexible, requiring only one
server for on-prem deployments. Or it can be
implemented in a customer-hosted cloud, or
delivered as a SaaS solution.
ROI:
364%
Benefits PV:
$3.8 million
NPV:
$3 million
Source: Forrester TEI study
Alation delivers next-generation governance, now.
Ask yourself:
What is the true purpose of data governance?
Why are you investing in it?
The traditional view is that it’s about being
centralized and defensive, ensuring compliance
and accountability to reduce business risk.
That’s what many solutions are primarily built
to do, and for good reason—these are indeed
critically important goals.
Alation Data Governance
The Alation view, however, looks forward and
sees governance as an essential tool to create
business value. We’re taking it to a different
place—towards distributed governance where
it’s built in by design, not imposed from the
outside.
It’s about much more than protecting the
organization. It’s about giving users confidence
in the data they use to make critical decisions.
It’s about unlocking data, improving its quality
and making it useful. It’s about empowering
people.
The Forrester Wave
Data Governance
Solutions
Q3 2021
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