Introduction for Knowledge Hub for Business Users
Learn about how Cloudera Octopai Knowledge Hub empowers business users to find, trust, and collaborate around critical data assets.
Data is supposed to help us make more informed, accurate business decisions.
But no matter how much data your organization has, if it’s hard to find, complicated to evaluate and tricky to use, it might as well not be there.
A data catalog makes finding, understanding and using business data as intuitive as choosing and purchasing a new shirt from an online marketplace.
When data powers sales and profits
The marketing team at a medium-sized consumer brand was tasked with coming up with ideas for campaigns promoting the company’s new product line. In the past, gathering data upon which to base the marketing campaigns had been a frustrating experience strewn with landmines:
- It was hard to locate all the relevant data on previous marketing campaigns and audience targeting.
- Each manager thought that his/her report is the most accurate report (i.e. no one source of truth).
- When numbers looked odd, the marketing team had no way of knowing for sure if the data was accurate or not.
- Inquiries to other departments to find the right person to ask about the inaccuracies and the versions rarely succeeded in turning up helpful information. Often they did eventually track someone down, but sometimes the party in question only had partial answers, and sometimes it was too late to make a difference for the campaign they had to deliver the next day.
The marketing team rarely felt fully comfortable with the data they were using to guide their campaign creation. Either they reluctantly used what data they had, having nothing better, or they just put the data to the side, not trusting it enough to make using it worth it. The marketing team often felt that their campaigns could be stronger and more successful if only they had the right data resources, but what to do? They didn’t.
This time, however, was different. The company had invested in a data catalog a few months earlier and the business team had been involved in the implementation, tagged the relevant marketing data, and validated its relevancy. So, the marketing team’s first stop in searching for relevant data from which to create the new campaign was the data catalog’s search and tagging functionality. Within seconds they had a comprehensive list of all marketing-, campaign- and audience-related datasets.
Now it was time to choose the most relevant datasets. The marketing team narrowed down the list by tags and data owners, preferring data assets that had been used in more than 100 reports and were recently maintained.
Of the remaining data assets, two of them looked like they were measuring audience engagement with the previous season’s campaigns, but the numbers were significantly different. One of the marketing managers posted a question about the difference in the communication section of each data asset’s catalog entry. Within an hour, they had an expert answer. The marketing team now understood what the difference was and which asset was more relevant for their purposes, and this exchange was saved in the catalog for future reference.
This season’s product marketing campaigns were compiled faster, and much more agile, targeted and effective than any the marketing team had designed before. These data catalog-powered campaigns took them less time to research and plan than usual. At the same time, they experienced less stress and felt less dependent on the company’s data team.
More sales and more profit, in less time and with less stress. Knowledge Hub win for business.
When the Knowledge Hub can save the day
- I spent a long time creating a report (or a dataset)… and after I finished
I found out that it existed already.
It is a frustrating waste of time and energy to duplicate what already exists. It is almost inevitable when data assets are not organized.
Your Knowledge Hub platform serves as a single, searchable repository for all data assets your company possesses.
- It takes me SO long to find the right data for my
project.
Without a Knowledge Hub, getting the data you need for a project is reminiscent of a poor blind dating experience. Based on whatever documentation exists, and some talking to colleagues, you are set up with a data asset you think has promise but are sometimes severely disappointed.
Your Knowledge Hub removes the blindness from your data matchmaking experience. You can search for what you think would make a good match, and then see your potential dates in the illuminating context of objective information about them, for example what accomplishments have they had, where do they usually go on dates, how many people have gone out with them, and subjective information, for example what prior relationships say about them. You can even ask questions to people who know them. The chances of meeting Mr. or Ms. Right Data go way, way up.
- Whenever I have a question about a data asset, it takes forever to get in
touch with someone who can give me an answer.
Who is the data owner? Who is the data steward? Is there a subject matter expert in the house or did she jump ship a month ago without a forwarding address?
Your data catalog can help in the following ways:- Clearly identifies the important roles for every data asset.
- Provides communication channels from within the catalog itself for getting answers and clarifications from those responsible for the data asset.
- Records these questions and conversations within the data asset entry, making this valuable tribal knowledge available to every future user who looks at the entry.
How you can make the Knowledge Hub a success
- Add to it.
The main bulk of the Knowledge Hub is created using automated processes. Once that is done, the data asset entries can be enriched with information that is not usually found in documentation, such as calculations, topic tags, descriptions, or ratings.
If you have created a data asset, making you the owner of that asset, check the automation created entry of that asset and fill in anything that is missing. If you are asked questions in the Knowledge Hub’s communication and collaboration tools, answer them. The more complete a data asset documentation entry is, the more people in your company can find, use and benefit from the data, while fewer will disturb you unnecessarily with questions that you have already answered.
If you use a data asset and find it helpful (or unhelpful), leave a brief user review in the asset documentation entry so that your colleagues can benefit from your experience and advice.
- Use it.
With a Knowledge Hub, you can see what data you have and find what data you need. You can rapidly locate decision-critical data and put it to use, speeding up time to insight and increasing business agility.
If you are looking over a colleague’s report, you can easily check up on which data assets were used in the report, what details about the data the report includes, and understand the scope of the data and any constraints on the dataset or on the report itself.
Additionally, the more you use the Knowledge Hub, the more it will be enriched with tribal knowledge, and the more helpful it will get in its search results and recommendations.
When you want to do research, create a report or understand someone else’s report, make the Knowledge Hub your first stop.
