Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud update targets productivity

New capabilities

Collibra's latest platform update, released on March 9, adds new and enhanced capabilities designed to increase user productivity.

This is not just a cool feature, but a genuinely useful approach for business users who may not want to constantly switch to governance applications just to understand their data better. It is 'context in context.'

The Collibra Everywhere browser extension connects to multiple sources, including Tableau and Power BI reports, and enables users to quickly view their data's underlying information so that they can better understand and trust their analytics. The browser extension works with Confluence, Salesforce, Jira, ServiceNow, Snowflake, SharePoint and online query editors.

By enabling users to quickly view underlying information, the new tool will save users the hassle of having to go back and forth between their data and a data governance application to see such information as data lineage and determine the quality of data, according to Donald Farmer, founder and principal of TreeHive Strategy.

Ultimately, that will increase users' speed and efficiency.

"This is not just a cool feature, but a genuinely useful approach for business users who may not want to constantly switch to governance applications just to understand their data better," he said. "It is 'context in context.' With this, users can quickly and effectively see information about the semantics and business context of the data they are using."

Enriched data governance capabilities will also lead to increased productivity, according to Mike Leone, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

The latest Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud update includes two additions to Collibra Data Quality & Observability.

One adds auto-validation capabilities that enable organizations to scale data discovery and data quality enforcement measures in order to protect sensitive data and reduce risk. The other enables data stewards to centralize and prioritize data quality requests within Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud, leading to faster remediation of data problems.

Meanwhile, the update also includes automation of data stewardship tasks, including data curation.

"By combining the new Data Quality & Observability capabilities with the automation of stewardship tasks, I think organizations can expect some eye-opening productivity gains," Leone said.

He added that high-quality data is critical as organizations make decisions based on data, but making sure that data can be trusted is complex, especially as organizations give more business users self-service tools.

"With Collibra extending its existing automation capabilities to focus on areas like sensitive data discovery and protection, data quality enforcement, and data curation at scale, data stewards are being armed with the tools they need to respond to the business faster and with confidence," Leone said.

Beyond the new browser extension and new data governance capabilities, the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud update addresses productivity with improved visualization capabilities. These enable users to quickly visualize and understand relationships between data sets, and include enhanced connectors to Tableau to better view metadata and Matillion to improve visibility into data lineage.

None of the new and enhanced capabilities in the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud update are revolutionary new tools or represent a significant overhaul of the platform, but they are a solid set of advancements that will benefit customers, according to Farmer.

"This is not a big step for Collibra, but still a useful update for users," he said.

Teaching tools

In addition to updating its Data Intelligence Cloud, Collibra introduced new educational learning paths and services aimed at helping users plan, design and execute more efficient data strategies. Like the new and enhanced capabilities, their goal is to enable Collibra customers to become more efficient and accelerate time to value.

In fact, the learning paths and services could prove just as important to customers as the new and updated data and analytics capabilities, Farmer said.

The learning paths and services include the following:

• The Foundation and Strategy Program to provide guidance as users develop roadmaps, prioritize applications and implement Collibra services;
• the Resident Architect Program to support users with a dedicated architect to guide and strengthen their use of Collibra over the course of one year; and
• the Data Quality Virtual Lab, a course that teaches users about data governance tasks and enables them to practice such governance workloads as running data quality checks, reviewing and analyzing reports and data scorecards, and configuring and managing rules and alerts.

"I was pleased to see the new learning paths," Farmer said. "Community -- the data citizens of its ecosystem -- has always been critical to the success of Collibra. It's good to see a company at the cutting edge taking the daily practice of its customers seriously."

Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget.