As businesses increasingly rely on data to make critical decisions, the accuracy of that information becomes vitally important. Yet, the process for verification has been haphazard at best.

Alation Inc., a company specializing is collaborative data cataloging, has introduced TrustCheck, a new tool that will visually put a stamp of approval on trustworthy sources or flag datasets that may be questionable.

“By having that spell check-like experience in the query tool, which is where most analytics projects start, we can reduce the amount of garbage going into the meeting rooms where business choices are being made,” said Aaron Kalb (pictured), vice president of design and strategic initiatives at Alation. “At every step, we can ensure that only the most trustworthy datasets are being used.”

Kalb spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, to discuss the various ways TrustCheck will help users and the methodology behind ensuring that data can be trusted. (* Disclosure below.)

Partnership with Salesforce and Tableau

TrustCheck is available via Salesforce.com Inc.’s Einstein Analytics and Tableau Software Inc.’s Server for the initial rollout of its visualization tool, and it’s also available through Alation Compose. Much like the spell check function in composing documents, TrustCheck will visually flag data sources.

“If I’m about to query a table that is deprecated or has a data quality issue, I’ll immediately see bright red on my screen. You can’t miss it, and I can fix my behavior,” Kalb explained. “These are on-screen indications of everything happening below that tip of the iceberg that affects [users] and the trustworthiness of the datasets they’re using.”

How can users trust TrustCheck? Alation uses a community of data stewards to evaluate and curate sources based on a catalog of indicators, such as whether a particular table was previously refreshed frequently and hadn’t been used in a while or if information was flagged upstream in the information pipeline.

“The biggest reason that an indicator will appear in a TrustCheck context is that a person, a data curator or steward, has put a warning or deprecation on a dataset,” Kalb said. “You can see the source.”

One of Alation’s data-driven customers offered a cautionary tale for what could go wrong when datasets aren’t correct. Company executives had prepared presentations for a crucial business decision and discovered, through an internal audit, that the information on which they were based was seriously wrong.

“A full third of them were off by an extraordinary amount, a number so big that the decision would have cut the other way had the numbers been accurate,” Kalb said. “Our goal is to say that whatever part of the analytics process you are in, you will get these real-time interventions to help get the information that is relevant to you.”

Watch the entire video interview with Kalb below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Alation Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Alation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE