DZone

As 2021 is now upon us (finally!), businesses are gearing up their strategy based on learnings from the past year. While insights help inform future plans, such as where to place budget and effort, there is one essential tool that each company should have at its disposal. If you’ve read the title, this shouldn’t come to you as such a surprise. We’re speaking about automated data lineage. With the ability to fully understand how data flows from one place to another, data lineage allows business processes to become more efficient and focused.

Data Lineage is Like Oil

In the webinar titled, ‘The Essential Guide to Data Lineage in 2021,’ Malcolm Chisholm, an expert in the fields of data management and data governance, shares his predictions for the coming year. To kick off the talk, he compares data lineage pathways to an oil refinery (one of our favorite analogies). Without our understanding of what is flowing through the pipes, we can’t determine how hot the oil is, it’s pressure levels, or even where it is going. Data lineage is thought to be the same. If companies don’t have a handle on exactly the data that is flowing between systems, they won’t be able to explain numbers that end up in a report. Malcolm Chisholm states that “data lineage is not just an arrow between two boxes, it’s a good deal more complicated than that.” The process requires knowledge of the data that the company has acquired an understanding of how it was stored or any obstacles that it encountered along the way. Additionally, ETL tools are more than just data movement, there is actually logic happening inside of them. With this component, you can understand data lineage overall.

Source: DZone