The Enterprise Data Catalog

Part II. Democratizing Data with a Data Catalog

The second part of this book is about a fortunate development in the global data community that is supported by technology: data democratization. Data democratization is about how more and more employees in companies are able to discover, access, and manage data, independently, without needing the assistance of a small, central data team. A data catalog contributes to this development by covering three major aspects of data democratization: how to discover, access, and manage data, which I will cover in this section.

In Chapter 5, “Discover Data: Empower End Users and Engage Stakeholders”, you will take a look at the idea of the data catalog as a social network and how the main stakeholders of a data catalog can benefit from it by discovering data and better fulfilling their tasks.

Then, Chapter 6, “Access Data: The Keys to Successful Implementation”, goes into the technical discussions of how you can provide access to data. Smooth access to data is a key parameter for a successful data catalog implementation.

Finally, in Chapter 7, “Manage Data: Improve Lifecycle Management”, you will be introduced to the lifecycles of data. These lifecycles can be very difficult to manage, but the data catalog is the key to the solution, leading to better data management altogether.