What Data Is Behind This Metric?

Now, think about your business and the data that you rely on to provide insights or support your processes and strategic business decisions. Do you have complete visibility into the data that flows throughout your organization? Are you able to identify potential problems and adjust your processes quickly to minimize business disruption? Can you see how well data is flowing from source to target in near-real-time?

These are some of the reasons why I am excited about our recent acquisition, NodeGraph. NodeGraph is a customizable metadata management platform with interactive automated data lineage, impact analysis and governance. In this blog post, I will talk about some of the unique business values this cool technology provides, and how it fits into our vision of Active Intelligence.

The need for “explainable BI” to increase user adoption of analytics and data

Today, most organizations are forsaking analytics adoption. Despite data’s powerful potential, the adoption of BI or analytics within organizations has not grown all that much. Gartner reports that enterprise BI adoption continues to linger at approximately 30%. One of the reasons for low adoption is the lack of “explainable BI” and trust in the data.

Making data-driven decisions is an issue when decision makers do not trust the data and have a poor understanding of where the data is coming from and the transformations that it has undergone. There is also the risk for misunderstanding, leading to misinformed decisions. With our upcoming data lineage feature, combined with NodeGraph power, we will provide visibility to data flows at field levels. For me, this is a key differentiator in making analytics and BI explainable.

Explainable AI is one of the recent trends in AI and is being reported as one of the key reasons for low AI adoption. Analytics consumers had similar problem for years, requiring explainability to gain visibility on the data that is behind a metric. With NodeGraph, users will gain visibility to immediate, full and interactive data and analytics lineage at the field level from any data source right in their analytics consumption experiences, without them having to reach out to the IT department or external specialists. This provides the confidence in the data to act on the insights it drives.

NodeGraph will help our users more fully understand and actively monitor the lifecycle of data regardless of source or end-user analytics environment, which perfectly matches our agnostic approach to data integration. It is designed as an open platform and works across a range of BI, data warehouse and cloud solutions, including Qlik, SSIS, Snowflake, Microsoft PowerBI, Tableau, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud.

Monitor the value of your data and analytics landscape

With data lineage, our goal is to help users gain visibility and avoid the dangers of not knowing by illustrating exactly which data gets used, how it gets used, where it comes from, and how it transforms as it flows across systems. We will design different dashboard views for different data personas showing insights into the health and usage of any analytics solution with key KPIs and reports. This type of understanding will help organizations confidently monitor and expand data and analytics access, increase adoption, modernize and migrate analytics to the cloud, and will help embed Qlik in data and analytics ecosystems where hyperscale platforms, such as AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, are ubiquitous.

Active Intelligence requires data lineage

As enterprises activate data and increase its use for real-time decision making on the journey to Active Intelligence, it’s crucial that data be timely, trustworthy and consistent across the entire organization. As part of a complete end-to-end analytics data pipeline, with NodeGraph’s technology, our users will be able to understand and actively monitor the lifecycle of data regardless of source or end-user analytics environment. Catalog in Qlik Cloud Services will expand from data catalog to analytics catalog, enabling augmented analytics consumers to search, find and understand data and KPIs, and, ultimately, will provide AI-powered recommendations supporting personalized analytics consumptions.

As organizations go through digital transformation, there is an even more urgent need to shine a light into the darkness of data, especially in complex environments with multiple BI, data warehouse and cloud solutions. With NodeGraph, our new SaaS catalog will provide greater data flow visibility across all data fabric, building trust and agility needed.