Data is important to the multifaceted goals of today’s enterprises — that isn’t news. From logistics to supply chain management, customer service, retail, manufacturing and service/solutions delivery, data is the digital linchpin that informs competent decision-making and drives bottomlines.

However, there needs to be a general rethink of how companies approach the business of data. As organizations wade through its widening landscape, business leaders and C-suite executives must create an environment that sees a holistic data culture as a strategic imperative. This need is encapsulated in Alation Inc.’s recent report on today’s data approach.

“Since 2020, Alation has been doing research into data culture and the trends in there, and the perception of it by industry professionals,” said Julie Smith (pictured), director of data and analytics at Alation. “This year we went out to almost 300 industry professionals. They’re very widespread, so we’re not getting any sort of leanings in the data toward people who already own a data catalog. We’ve got the results to see now, and speaking as someone who is a data professional, I find it really interesting to see these things out there in the wider world.”

Smith spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Rob Strechay during a CUBE Conversation from SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio in Boston. They discussed the report, highlighting valuable insights into the challenges, trends and best practices shaping the data culture landscape. (* Disclosure below.)

Unpacking the report: The four pillars of data maturity

Known for helping organizations find, understand and trust their data, Alation offers a unique perspective through its data catalog and intelligence platform. Its insight plays a key role in recognizing the intersection of people and data culture for an organization’s success, particularly in the era of data-driven decision-making and artificial intelligence evolution.

“I was a customer of Alation before I came to work for [the company] to perform their data analytics function internally for them,” Smith said. “I actually represent, inside Alation, what our customers go through and are seeking. Something that led me to meet Alation as a company was the fact they recognized, some time ago, the pivotal role that people and data culture play in an organization’s success, in particular to organizations that want to become data-driven and use data in other ways, with AI being the most recent evolution of that.”

Covering 292 data professionals across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America, “The State of Data Culture Maturity” report seeks to paint a clear picture of the data culture now and its positioning in the future. Understanding that measurable yardsticks need to be established for objective quantification, the report has a framework based on four pillars: leadership, governance, data accuracy, and data search and discovery, offering a comprehensive view of an organization’s data culture maturity.

Notably, the report highlights an 89% correlation between strong data leadership and organizations meeting or exceeding revenue goals. This further buttresses the direct impact of leadership on business success, according to Smith.

“We look at leadership [and] the drive from the top to promote the use of data, be that through your CDOs, CDAOs, whatever guys that is, but is there a strong leader in the organization to help permeate that?” she said. “And who else in the leadership roles in the organization is helping to drive that [culture]?”

Touching on trust, governance and data accuracy

Governance is a core data operation, and it’s seeing a whirlwind of change from the ground up. Data governance has shifted from being based on compliance-centric models to value-driven, offensive data governance, according to Smith. The federated model of data governance, where various business areas actively contribute, is emerging as a practical approach.

“There’s governance, data governance, which is evolving a lot and much more rapidly these days than it has for some time to enable us to use data,” she explained. “It’s about compliance, yes, but it’s also about facilitating the use of data and giving so much more value to it. There’s data accuracy, understanding the data, what it can do, what it is telling you and how to respect it in the entire life cycle it might have.”

Tying into data accuracy is search and discovery. Data can only be harnessed when understood in its full form, with sufficient context and source information to tie together disparate originating sources, Smith noted.

“You might have great data out there, but if people don’t know where it is, the context of it and how to access it, then they’re not going to be able to be data-driven because they have no data to be driven by,” she said.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Julie Smith:

(* Disclosure: Alation Inc. this segment of theCUBE. Neither Alation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE