erwin and data governance

The software product erwin has a long history, dating back to 1993 as a data modelling tool created by Logic Works. In 2021 erwin was acquired by Quest, a systems management vendor owned by private equity company Clearlake, and it is now integrated into the broader Quest suite. The erwin technology has a substantial data governance component that is marketed directly against products such as Collibra and Alation.

The erwin by Quest platform has several components, from its original data modelling tool through to enterprise architecture modelling, and data discovery, catalog and data quality functionality within its erwin Data Intelligence product. The tool has connectors to many sources that allow it to extract metadata and build a catalog of data and profile that data, building up an asset register of datasets, columns, etc.  The product has visual display of the lineage of data and has a full-fledged data quality capability, including data cleansing, matching using machine learning, data enrichment etc. erwin Data Intelligence has over a hundred customers including energy company E.ON and Petco, with further companies in the financial services, insurance and government space. The technology builds a business glossary and can help identify sensitive data such as social security numbers. There is support for data stewardship and you can easily see the lineage of a given data item in the product via an easy to follow interface.

There is an appealing visualisation capability and a comprehensive search capability, allowing business end users to search for data associated with, for example “customer” and discover this in the business glossary, see who the data owner of that data is etc. erwin Data Marketplace allows organisations to automatically score data for reliability and value, leveraging user ratings and reviews, data quality scores and data governance curation completeness to help build a picture of the trustworthiness of specific data and lay the groundwork for potential monetization.

erwin Data Intelligence offers a quite comprehensive set of data governance capabilities, with its data marketplace concept and its intuitive catalog search capabilities offering an appealing way to navigate the potentially complex world of corporate metadata. It is a product that will appeal to larger organizations that want a technology to help them with their process of getting better control of their corporate data.