Blasting off: Why proactive data governance is propelling innovation
Reflections on Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, 2024
Team Solidatus recently returned from Gartner's Data & Analytics Summit inspired and energized by our industry's rapid advancements. Businesses across all sectors now recognize deep data expertise as essential for sustained success.
At every Gartner event, a reverence for data’s power is a given. However, last week, amidst 5000 attendees, a new message emerged: data can be fun! We wholeheartedly agree – this was core to the keynote delivered by Bank of New York Mellon’s CDO, Eric Hirschhorn, alongside Solidatus CEO, Philip Dutton. He showed the audience that with a dynamic data governance strategy in place, tedious manual tasks disappear, paving the way for innovation and discovery.
Bank of New York Mellon’s CDO, Eric Hirschhorn, presents to a packed room
The alternative is dire – in a landmark report released last year, 73% of global data leaders express that nearly half of their time is wasted due to inefficiencies, and that data distress has prompted 71% of data leaders in banking and financial services to consider quitting their jobs.
The message is clear: Without effective data governance, complexity results in silos, information mismatches, and limited visibility into data movement across the organization.
But there IS a solution – Solidatus!
Key takeaways from Solidatus’ keynote: Truth, Trust and AI – Pro-active Data Governance with BNY Mellon
Without connectivity, even the most advanced technology stacks come up short, leading to stagnant governance and wasted resources. Cutting-edge institutions like BNY Mellon, managing nearly $50 trillion in assets, wrestled with complex data and lacked a unified view of their digital landscape – until Solidatus came into play.
Leveraging our next-gen data lineage and connected catalog, America’s oldest bank removed data silos and built a metadata control center with unprecedented traceability.
The results have been extremely powerful:
- In under 4 weeks, Solidatus delivered complete, end-to-end lineage for 3 reports, ingesting data sets from 60 source systems.
- In less than 9 months, a small team documented critical data steps and elements to create an enterprise data supply chain view for liquidity reporting. They’ve successfully demonstrated end-to-end lineage of 16 reports.
- To date, they’ve modeled 3,000 datasets in a data lake, along with 250 authoritative datasets, 10,000 data quality rules, and 170 data contracts, providing newfound clarity and visibility.
The team now uses a metadata-driven blueprint to connect their data sources and processes. Both business and IT teams can collaborate easily to explore and discuss data impact scenarios, leveraging current, past, and future data flows. This is fueling transformation, AI integration, risk management, and revenue enhancement.
“Organizations that truly understand their data – its purpose, its journey, and its quality – will own the future. Whether applying AI, driving digital transformation, or ensuring regulatory compliance, a three-dimensional map of your data estate lays the foundation for informed decision-making. Solidatus stands as the sole platform offering this unified and actionable view.”
Philip Dutton, CEO & Founder, Solidatus
Other Gartner insights: Those who know their data will own the future
While it would be difficult to summarize all the valuable insights we learnt from the numerous talks we attended, several key points resonated with our team:
- Effective management of the Data & Analytics function and governance is pivotal for AI readiness, emphasizing execution over strategy and focusing on functional maturity for value creation. This entails implementing robust metadata management, data observability, and governance to ensure accessible and up-to-date data products.
- When you know exactly what data you have, where it’s sourced from, and whether your business is properly sourcing from authoritative sources, implementing safe AI becomes much easier.
- Metadata serves as the cornerstone for efficiency, connectivity, and user experience in data management. Developing metadata maturity is essential for future-proofing your data analytics capabilities, whether it involves adopting data fabrics or preparing for Generative AI.
- Data management markets are evolving towards convergence, reshaping software selection and provisioning methods. New ecosystems, combining data fabric and AI, will bring about innovative business practices. The data mesh and data fabric differ in their approach, with the former emphasizing distributed data management and the latter utilizing existing infrastructure.
The Solidatus way
Discover how Solidatus frees data teams from boring, manual work, empowering innovation
Solidatus’ next-gen data lineage gives global enterprises like HSBC, BNYM and Citi the foundation needed to solve their most complex data challenges. It eliminates data management silos, enabling a unified, enterprise-wide view of data governance that fosters a holistic understanding of the entire data ecosystem. We deliver business-critical solutions across numerous areas including:
- Governance and regulatory compliance
- Data risk and controls
- Business integration
- Environment, Social and Governance
- Data sharing
- AI readiness
Explore how Solidatus tackles business challenges head-on
Solidatus in action: All-new interface to unite IT and business
Watch a short video that introduces Solidatus’ new interface, with the world’s first lineage-enabled data catalog.
Solidatus in action: Technology demonstration
Watch a short video to learn how a Solidatus user builds and navigates an enterprise data blueprint.
Solidatus in action: Compliance and governance
Watch a short video to learn how understanding data origins improves access controls, compliance enforcement, and issue remediation.
We’d love to hear your data challenges and show you how Solidatus can help. For a personalized consultation and demo, click the button below.
Written by: Philip Dutton
Co-Founder & CEO at Solidatus
Philip is a Senior System Architect and Project Manager with over 20 years’ experience within Financial Services.
