Data Governance with AWS

Chapter 3. Understanding Your Data

Understanding your data means that you possess knowledge about the data, such as the content, meaning, quality, and how the data is used. It involves not only grasping the raw facts about the data but also recognizing patterns, trends, and relationships among data. When you truly understand your data, you go beyond surface-level knowledge and gain the capacity to draw informed conclusions, make informed decisions, and communicate the significance of the data to others.

Developing and sharing descriptive information about data, or metadata, across the organization can be difficult.¹ Hence, organizations must implement a process to manage metadata as part of data deployment projects rather than as an afterthought. Metadata is information that describes and explains data to provide sufficient context, such as the definition, source, type, owner, and relationships to other datasets. For example, when reporting revenue information, it’s important to know the sources, definition, calculations, and transformations that led to the revenue report, as well as who certifies its accuracy.

Today, understanding your organization’s data is crucial for supporting business initiatives:

• Determining the most appropriate data to use for targeted applications and business decisions

• Building trust in using data for business decisions

• Understanding any challenges in the data, including data quality issues and overlaps of data across sources

• Sharing data demographics ...