Infogix Data360 Govern

Infogix Data360 is a browser-based, enterprise-ready data intelligence platform. It consists of three components: Data360 Govern, Data360 DQ+, and Data360 Analyze. Each of these components brings together a wide array of separate capabilities within a single platform in order to provide solutions for data governance, data quality, and data analytics, respectively. For example, Data360 DQ+ contains data quality validation and profiling, machine learning driven data quality improvement, full dashboarding and visualisation, case management, collaboration (such as tasking) and so on. However, for the purposes of this paper, we are most interested in the product’s data governance piece, Data360 Govern, which includes policy management, data cataloguing, data stewardship, a business glossary, AI driven data tagging and classification, and workflows. It also includes data profiling capabilities.

Regardless of the component being deployed, Infogix uses an ongoing, strategic assessment of your business needs to deliver (and maximise) business value. This involves discovering your most immediate concerns, formulating an approach to address them (with an emphasis on providing the fastest possible time to value), building out your first use case described within that approach, and optimising and automating that use case before moving onto the next. For data governance in specific, this takes the form of “business-driven data governance”, in which Data360 Govern will identify your business assets, define “business impact characteristics” such as critical fields, business terms, business lineage, ownership and data quality standards, then implement data governance (and, relatedly, data quality) to govern those characteristics. As with Infogix’ overarching implementation strategy, the focus is placed on addressing the most important and critical business requirements and data sets first before expanding as necessary.

Customer Quotes

“Data360 delivered the most business-friendly platform, allowing both business and IT teams the ability to administrate and personalize to their specific requirements with minimal technical intervention.”
Large American Mutual Insurance and Financial Services Company

“For every $1 we invest on prevention, we get a $15 return.”
Major Nordic Bank

Data360 and Data360 Govern sit between your data sources on the one hand and your business outcomes on the other, providing data governance, quality and management while exposing your data for consumption. The latter can be achieved via search, which provides access to all assets (data or not) as well as any related information, or its data catalogue, each of which can be accessed via the (customisable) home page shown in Figure 1. The product in general is easy to use and is well suited for business users. However, it is also capable of displaying increased granularity and technical detail when required.

The aforementioned home page provides access to your business glossary, as well as governance assets such as business rules, dashboards, metrics, and so on. These governance assets can in large part be prepopulated using Infogix’ standard metamodel, providing generic, out of the box rules, goals and so on that will be applicable for a wide variety of organisations and use cases.  These are flexible, and can be customised for your specific needs, or the needs of a specific industry. Regardless, they will provide a useful jump-start, and in many cases immediate value.

All assets within the platform are equipped with a variety of information. Depending on the type of asset, this could include scoring information (with drill down to a chart of the asset’s value over time), various visualisations (such as business lineage and impact analysis, the latter of which is shown in Figure 2), a list of any related assets (which can also be visualised via a graph), user submitted comments, a changelog, and actioning (for example, kicking off a task or workflow).

Sensitive data discovery is also supported via data profiling and semantic tagging. This is used to find sensitive data via analysis of its “data signature”, then to mark it as sensitive, personal or PII, as and when appropriate.

Fig 02 – Impact analysis in Data360 govern

Data360 Govern’s greatest – though by no means only – strength is the emphasis it places on your business needs and requirements. This degree of business orientation allows it to directly address said needs at every stage of the governance process and therefore provide maximal business value with minimal waiting time. This is exemplified in the company’s iterative and ongoing implementation and assessment strategy, which implements your governance solution in a coherent, structured fashion that ensures that your most important needs are taken care of first, that priority is always given to your most pressing needs, that your solution fulfils demonstrable business goals (and hence achieves desirable business outcomes) repeatedly and throughout its lifespan, and that your solution is optimised and highly automated.

In addition, and as mentioned, the product’s standard metamodel is adept at accelerating time to value, allowing you to get up and running very quickly. What’s more, the flexibility it provides allows you to customise it iteratively as your use cases require it, meaning that changes to it can be implemented such that they always contribute to concrete business goals. This fits neatly into Infogix’ methodology of business-driven governance as described above. In combination with said methodology, this capability allows the product to provide governance to the most critical areas of your system very quickly.

The Bottom Line

Infogix Data360, and in particular Data360 Govern, provide a data governance solution that positions your business needs at the forefront of your data governance. This can only be a good thing.