You may have heard SAP talking about the concept of trusted data discovery. SAP defines this as “Delivering agility for business users alongside scale and trust for IT and management” – of course, in the context of analytics. Everyone wants that!
The next question is usually, “What does that really mean?” In this blog, I’m going to focus on the trusted data piece. We know that the best analytics are built on trusted data.
How does an agile visualization tool like SAP Lumira deliver trusted data? There are two levels of that answer.
- Level 1: Trusted data comes from trusted, curated sources. No, personal Excel files don’t count. Shadow spreadmarts on a shared drive don’t count. By curated sources, we mean sources that have been thoughtfully formed, reviewed, and operationalized. (These words also imply that the source has a data that is regularly refreshed.) Common types of these curated sources are SAP Business Warehouse (BW), SAP BusinessObjects BI universes, enterprise data warehouses, and SAP HANA views.
The first level of trusted data comes from shared, trusted sources. Your company put in a lot of time, effort, and money to create these sources for a reason. Use them. Mash them with personal, social, and machine data to reach new insights.
SAP Lumira is great at accessing these trusted data sources. But, because you need to mash them with other sources, you also may need to tweak formats, code representations, and so on. You can do this directly in SAP Lumira. Someone out there is wondering if the “refresh” guideline is broken. Not at all. SAP Lumira keeps track of these changes, so you can refresh the data and your changes are still respected. Boom.
Back up…have you defined what good looks like? Is it complete? Has it been reviewed and approved by the appropriate people? And can you prove it? These are just some of the aspects of a successful information governance program. Information governance provides information that is fit for use. This is the second layer of trust.
Do you have an information governance program? Are you interested in assessing your efforts and building an information strategy?
SAP solutions for enterprise information management can help you with the technology piece of the information governance discipline.
How are you establishing data trust in your organization? A long time consultant told me “Data has a reputation – like a girl in a small town.” Make sure your reputation is good!
