While data has emerged as the backbone of modern enterprises, democratizing that data remains a massive challenge.

To address this challenge, data intelligence company Collibra NV is helping companies cultivate an effective data culture. The ultimate goal: make all employees data citizens.

During the recent “Data Citizens 2022” event on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, Collibra executives discussed why ease of use and scale are essential in the data space, as well as the importance of a data culture and how data citizens factor into the equation. During the event, theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin  led sessions highlighting why data quality and observability should not be just an afterthought.

“Data quality used to be this back-office function, and then it became sort of front office with financial services and government and healthcare, these highly regulated industries,” Vellante said during the event. “And then the whole chief data officer thing happened, and people sort of flipped data-as-a-risk to data-as-an-asset. And now, as we say, we’re going to talk about observability; it’s really become front and center, just the whole quality issue because data’s fundamental.”

Expert guests included Collibra’s Felix Van de Maele, founder and chief executive officer; Kirk Haslbeck, vice president of data quality; Laura Sellers (pictured), chief product officer; and Stijn “Stan” Christiaens, co-founder and chief data citizen. (* Disclosure below.)

In case you missed it, here are three key insights from the “Data Citizens 2022,” event:

1). Want a data revolution? A data culture should be at the epicenter.

With efficiency, productivity and cost control top of mind for organizations, the need for data intelligence is even more important, especially when scaling data, according to Van de Maele. Everyone in the enterprise should have easy access to trustworthy data; thus, everyone should be a “data citizen.”

“We all know the constraint and the challenges with data, how to actually do data at scale,” Van de Maele said. “Now’s the time we need to look beyond just the technology and infrastructure to think of how to scale data, how to manage data at scale. And that’s why now is really the time to deliver this data intelligence vision, the data intelligence platform.”

Part of what triggers the data revolution is cultural and community transformation. Once everyone in an organization treats data as an asset, the emergence of a conducive data culture becomes inevitable. This is why Collibra deems anyone who uses data to do their job a data citizen, according to Christiaens.

“So what does it mean to have a good data culture? It means that if you’re building a beautiful dashboard to try and convince your boss we need to make this decision, that your boss is also open to and able to interpret the data presented in the dashboard to actually make that decision and take that action,” he stated.

Being competitive is one of the primary objectives in the enterprise world. Therefore, companies that adopt a data culture propel their competitive edge, as showcased by a recent IDC study, Christiaens added.

“We did an IDC study earlier this year, quite interesting,” he said. “One of the conclusions they found as they surveyed over a thousand people across organizations worldwide is that the ones who are higher in maturity — so the organizations that really look at data as an asset, look at data as a product, and actively try to be better at it — do have three times as good a business outcome as the ones who are lower on the maturity scale.”

Data intelligence coupled with a conducive data culture makes enterprises successful and competitive. This is based on the use of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence when undertaking tasks such as monitoring data pipelines in the cloud.

“Data culture for everyone, awakening them up as data citizens. I’m doing this for competitive reasons, I’m doing this for regulatory reasons; you’re trying to bring both of those together,” Christiaens noted. “The ones that get data intelligence right are just going to be more successful and more competitive.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Felix Van de Maele:

And here’s theCUBE’s interview with Stijn “Stan” Christiaens:

2). Ease of use and scale should be the norm in the data space.

The people and process side of the data equation continues to lag behind, because getting insights from data is still a tall order. Nevertheless, Collibra enables enterprises to easily access and manage data by taking advantage of the ease of use and scale aspects. For instance, Collibra’s Workflow Designer propels scalability through automation, according to Sellers.

“It’s a big differentiator to be able to automate business processes,” she said. “The designer is really about a way for more people to be able to create those workflows, collaborate on those workflows, as well as people to be able to easily interact with them.”

When it comes to easily finding, understanding and accessing data, Collibra’s Data Marketplace is a perfect fit, because it offers an Amazon-like data shopping experience meant to accelerate the time-to-value, according to Sellers. The idea is to make data accessibility as simple as possible.

“What we’re announcing from our ease of use side of the world is first our Data Marketplace; this is the ability for all users to discover and access data quickly and easily shop for it,” she said. “Having a consumer-grade experience — where users can quickly go in and find the data, trust that data, understand where the data’s coming from and then be able to quickly access it — is the idea of being able to shop for it.”

To provide users with richer experiences, Collibra launched a new homepage, according to Sellers. Furthermore, it incorporated the ease of use aspect by availing trusted data for enhanced use cases.

“The next thing that we’re also introducing is the new homepage; it’s really about the ability to drive adoption and have users find data more quickly,” she added.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Laura Sellers:

3) Want the bigger picture? Data quality should not be questionable.

Since data is the lifeblood of enterprises, its quality should be up to standard to ensure accurate insights. Collibra enhances data quality through observability tools meant for roles like root cause analysis, according to Haslbeck.

“We’ve always covered data quality, and we believe that people want to know more,” he pointed out. “They need more insights, and they want to see break records and breaking trends together so they can correlate the root cause. So we’re really focused on root cause analysis, business impact, connecting it with lineage, catalog and metadata.”

Having stale data can be a costly affair. That’s why observability comes in handy. It propels the timeliness, quality and freshness of data.

“What’s been so exciting is we have these types of observation techniques, these data monitors that can actually track past performance of every field at scale,” Haslbeck added.

Collibra takes data quality a notch higher by enabling functions such as compute in databases like Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Delta Lake, and SQL Pushdown, this takes data intelligence and governance a notch higher, according to Haslbeck. This is made possible through native database pushdown.

“While we’ve always worked with the same databases in the past, we’re doing something called native database pushdown, where the entire compute and data activity happens in the database,” he stated. “We’re now doing all compute and data operations in databases like Snowflake. And what that means is with no install and no configuration, you could log into the Collibra Data Quality app and have all of your data quality running inside the database.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Kirk Haslbeck:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Data Citizens 2022 event. Neither Collibra, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE