Building data literacy internally with Talend Data Inventory

Welcome back to our educational series on promoting data literacy. In a previous blog post, I shared steps for starting a data literacy program. This time, I’m going to unveil details about our own data literacy program here at Talend, and specifically how we use Talend products to increase access to reliable, high-quality data.

Not everyone comes to Talend with a data background — we have lots of people in administrative roles and sales and marketing team members who joined us from less data-driven companies. But organization-wide data literacy is critical in today's environment. As a reminder, being data literate means that employees can read, interpret, and understand data in context.

Using Talend tools to enable data literacy

I’m excited to share how we use our own Talend products to break through departmental silos, build trust in our datasets, and raise the bar for data literacy across the entire business. In this post, I’ll focus on Talend Data Inventory

Talend Data Inventory

A data inventory is a data mapping tool that gives you visibility across all your datasets. The engineers at Talend built Talend Data Inventory with a user-friendly web interface for self-service data. Everyone from citizen integrators to data engineers can collaborate on Talend Data Inventory to find and share datasets — all without relying on IT or writing a line of code.

Talendians access Talend Data Inventory through Okta to search through internal datasets we’ve made available to them in Talend Cloud. With self-serve access, our employees can explore those datasets, review their sources, and evaluate their trustworthiness. Users can then request access to datasets for additional analysis. We also mobilize data owners and stewards to document and certify the datasets they know best. This provides a centralized source of trust.

Most Talendians are assigned to a generic employee group in Talend Data Inventory. This lets them explore datasets that do not contain privileged information. Analysts within Talend can also be assigned to a specific department group, which will give them access to additional datasets specific to their departmental needs.

Demo: How Talendians use Talend Data Inventory

Improving our access to data strengthens our data culture

You can see how Talend Data Inventory helps us break through data silos and build trust across departments and roles. Anyone can find data, learn about it, and share it without ever having to loop in — and wait for — IT.

Talend products are modular, so whatever your data literacy goals are you can build a complete solution tailored to your unique needs. In my next post, I’ll share how we use Talend Data Catalog to support internal data literacy.

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