How we build internal data literacy with Talend Data Catalog

By Bethany Gripp

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In previous blog posts, I've shared steps for starting a data literacy program and showed you how we build data literacy internally with Talend Data Inventory.

Using Talend tools to enable data literacy

Talend Data Inventory helps us break through data silos and build trust across departments and roles. But what about the privileged information we have? For that, it’s time to talk about Talend Data Catalog.

Talend Data Catalog

A data catalog is a highly organized inventory with additional metadata management capabilities designed to support business users.

Sometimes you need more than visibility and collaboration across all your datasets — you also need to stay in alignment with strict governance and compliance requirements. That requires detailed lineage and a common language for data. You can think of Talend Data Catalog as a data governance catalog or metadata management.

Talend Data Catalog applies machine learning and artificial intelligence to metadata management. It automatically crawls, profiles, and organizes all the data assets. Then, it keeps the metadata up to date through automation. That way, Talend Data Catalog gives us an easy way to answer questions like where the data came from, when it’s changed over time, and who has access to it.

We use Talend Data Catalog to automatically harvest Tableau reports, Talend integration jobs, and changes in Snowflake. This gives us full lineage and data impact analysis.

In the business glossary, we document definitions of common terms used across the organization, including acronyms, metric definitions, industry terminology, and Talend’s application inventory. The business glossary eliminates ambiguity in conversations about data.

There are two main levels of access: consumer and producer. Most Talendians are going to be assigned the consumer role, which includes ‘read-only’ access to the catalog. A producer has ‘write-access’ to some catalog features based on role. Data owners and stewards for particular datasets get producer access so they can update the glossary, add notes, and more.

Demo: How Talendians Use Talend Data Catalog

Using Talend Data Catalog as a single point of control to collaborate simplifies our data governance. Built-in governance capabilities improve access to data, accuracy of that data, and ensure business relevance.

Results of our data literacy program

We’re excited to report that our data literacy program is going very well. Within 6 months, we saw a 55% increase in metadata enrichment in Talend Data Catalog, and implemented 5 business glossaries. However, the coolest change is the new behavior of conducting data impact analysis before reports or data sources are changed, solidifying our data-centric culture.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, because we’ve got teams at Talend using other Talend products for all kinds of use cases.