Alation Inc., the collaborative data company, announced increased support for Chief Data Officers looking to manage their data as an asset. Alation 5.0 will include new features and a services package to make data asset valuation simple by promoting the adoption of Infonomics. The Alation Data Catalog 5.0 will be the first solution to incorporate these metrics into an enterprise data catalog. These new capabilities further Alation’s commitment to delivering the most complete enterprise data catalog in the market.
Increasingly, Chief Data Officers are finding that the adoption of a data catalog is only a starting point for information asset management. By automating an inventory of the data available in an organization, data catalogs track information assets just as one would inventory physical assets for accounting purposes. However, to properly manage information assets, Chief Data Officers require a robust and consistent way to calculate potential economic benefits for every information asset. Standard accounting practices today are limited to physical asset evaluation.
In his newly released book, “Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage,” Doug Laney, vice president (VP) and distinguished analyst with Gartner’s Chief Data Officer (CDO) Research team, describes how calculating the value of each information asset delivers clarity to complex decisions around data accessibility, data governance and data management.
Most of the thousands of CDOs appointed in the past few years have been chartered with improving the efficiency and value-generating capacity of their organization’s information ecosystem,” according to Doug Laney. “That is, they’ve been asked to lead their organization in treating and leveraging information with the same discipline as its other, more traditional assets.”*
Two fundamental valuation models are introduced in Infonomics to assist with these decisions, the intrinsic value of information (IVI) and the business value of information (BVI). IVI gauges how correct and complete the information asset is and its uniqueness to the organization. BVI considers how relevant an information asset is for a specific business purpose. Together, these models enable consistent comparisons across information classes and assist in identifying critical gaps in information’s realized versus potential value.
For some time Alation has tracked detailed usage metrics as a way to evaluate the impact of data assets in an organization,” said Satyen Sangani, CEO, Alation. “The inclusion of Infonomics models in the Alation Platform, combined with the understanding of how data is used, creates an unprecedented foundation of accountability in data management initiatives. Tracking information asset impact and return over an applicable period of time is critical to the success of today’s Chief Data Officer.”
The Alation Data Catalog 5.0 will embed Infonomics metrics as part of the context automatically created for each data asset in the enterprise. Data consumers, data curators and chief data officers will have access to these metrics on the catalog page of every data asset inventoried in Alation. For evaluating the intrinsic value of information, this will include metrics such as the validity and completeness of the data. Data catalog pages will also include measurements of the business value of information such as relevance and popularity. These features will be complemented by Alation’s professional services offering designed to guide organizations through a process of aligning Infonomics with their data usage and management strategies – a top concern for the CDOs and data leaders responsible for their organizations’ strategic data initiatives.
*Laney, Douglas B. Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage. Routledge, 2017, p. 9.
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