erwin Data Intelligence by Quest

erwin is known for erwin Data Modeler by Quest, a market-leading data modelling tool dating back to 1993 used to visualise data assets and help developers to design and build corporate databases. The erwin by Quest suite of products has since been extended to cover data intelligence, data and AI governance, enterprise architecture and business process modelling needs. erwin Data Intelligence by Quest supports data and AI governance initiatives and offers data catalog, data quality, data stewardship, data discovery, data lineage and data marketplace capabilities. The technology offers more than 120 data connectors to numerous software products to extract metadata from these in order to provide enterprise data landscape visibility, develop data intelligence, and speed up the building of data pipelines. 135 enterprise-level organisations worldwide actively use erwin’s data governance capabilities every day, many of which are in highly regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, government, insurance, and utilities such as energy giant E.ON and financial advisors St James’s Place. erwin Data Intelligence 14 was released in August 2024 and offers erwin Data Intelligence Cloud, a Quest-hosted offering on Microsoft Azure, as well as upgraded AI/ML-enabled data quality discovery and data observability capabilities.

Customer Quotes

“erwin Data Intelligence is more than a reference library. It’s a living, breathing capability that will allow us to manage our data estate much more effectively in the future.”
Ian Peters, Divisional Director of Group Data Management, St. James’s Place

“I’m excited about erwin Data Marketplace. In 2024, it’s about scaling up at Tokio Marine HCC, getting data products into erwin Data Marketplace and getting our user base an easier way for everyone to find their data, access their data and then be able to leverage that data.”
Kevin Smith, Chief Data Officer, Tokio Marine HCC

Data owners can be assigned and the product supports workflow for data stewards, who curate and bring together technical assets with business assets such as business terms, policies, rules and more, manage data classifications, and manage requests for data access. Asset discovery and collaboration, including the recently released erwin Data Marketplace, provide consumer-like capabilities to allow end users to analyse, compare and share data products, datasets, AI models and other data assets, commenting on and ranking the usefulness of assets in a similar way that they might rank and comment on movies or products they have purchased on-line. Automated data value scoring for reliability and value can also be leveraged. Companies determine the weighting of these user ratings and reviews, of data quality scores and of data governance curation completeness to yield a data value score and visual indicator that can help make trusted, high-value assets quickly recognisable for data marketplace consumers and lay the groundwork for potential monetisation. The software can be deployed on-premises, privately hosted in a company’s own cloud instance, or deployed as erwin Data Intelligence Cloud, a Quest-hosted offering on Azure.

The software has automatic data asset discovery, speeding up the onboarding of data assets using techniques including fuzzy logic. The software can recognise a business term such as a social security number and can find all columns with that term based on column definitions, presenting that to a data steward. The product has visual displays such as knowledge graphs and mind maps to allow end users to easily visualise the relationships surrounding business and technical assets. Data elements can be classified as sensitive for personally identifiable information purposes. Data lineage assessment can be carried out right down to table and column level, and both business and technical data lineage characteristics can be displayed within the same all-in-one data lineage tool, with views instantly switched and filtered depending on the audience. Customers can define organisational terms, business and AI risk policies, regulations and processes and set up automated governance workflow processes to evaluate and authorise changes.

Data governance is more than just populating a standalone data catalog and business glossary. The governance process extends to data quality and reliability, and is not a one-off exercise but something that requires constant monitoring. erwin has long been the de-facto standard for data modelling, and so many customers may wish to use an integrated suite of tools, from modelling through to data quality through to catalog, data lineage and marketplace, rather than dealing with a series of tools from different vendors and having to interface these together.

The software automates many of the time-consuming aspects associated with data discovery, quality assessment, business contextualisation, governance guidance and organisational data literacy enablement and data accessibility.

The bottom line

erwin Data Intelligence is a full-function data governance product that can also leverage the proven erwin data modelling tool. It competes with other such products like Collibra and Alation, and should be considered for companies wishing to embark on enterprise-wide data governance. Its latest version shows considerable ongoing investment in the technology.