At a time when business autonomy and analytical speed are redesigning the standards of Business Intelligence, organizations must be able to explore, make reliable and exploit their data without relying on technical teams. This is where the intelligent data catalog comes in: a new generation of data catalogs enriched by local artificial intelligence (on-premise), guaranteeing security, confidentiality and compliance. More than a referencing tool, it becomes a discovery engine, automated governance and augmented analytics, perfectly integrated into modern architectures such as Data Mesh. See how this technology pivot accelerates decision-making, improves data quality, and empowers businesses in a data-driven ecosystem.
An expert review by Nicolas Vaillier, Product Expert Suadeo
In a world where data has become the driving force behind strategic decisions, companies face a major challenge: to effectively exploit an ever-increasing volume of information dispersed across multiple sources. However, various studies show that 47% of employees struggle to find the right information, and 82% of the time spent on data is devoted to research and preparation, at the expense of analysis and decision-making.
In this context, the Data Catalog is an essential strategic lever. By nature, the data catalog structures, documents and centralizes all of an organization’s data. Designed to adapt to the needs of business users, it facilitates the exploration of all data to identify leverage actions.
A step above, by incorporating an on-premise artificial intelligence, the Data Catalogs become strategic and secure tools to help businesses find optimization levers, and finally, adjust their action plans. We are talking about Smart Data Catalogs, capable of offering users contextualized recommendations and improving themselves in an automated way by detecting inconsistencies and facilitating the linking of data with business repositories. A technology that drastically reduces the time spent manipulating data, automatically improves its reliability, and boosts performance by supporting users in recalibrating decisions in real-time.
1 – Democratizing access and use of data
Gone are the days when the data heritage was reserved for technical experts. The Data Catalog transforms raw data into “Usage Data”, an asset accessible and exploitable by all users, regardless of their technical level and without prior preparation.
In a Data Mesh architecture, which distributes responsibility for data to business domains, each user can enrich metadata, create data model, build dashboards, and share real-time information with third party systems via REST APIs. More than a simple repository, the Data Catalog becomes an intelligent search engine, while guaranteeing the quality of the data and the company’s regulatory compliance.
2 – Secure your data wealth at the highest level
Faced with increasingly stringent regulations (GDPR, HDS, ISO 27001, AI Act), companies and public administrations must ensure unimpeachable traceability of data and the uses that are made of it. For the so-called “sensitive” IS, which host critical or qualified data “restricted distribution”, and which are governed by regulations such as interministerial instruction II 901 or IGI 1300, the level of requirement is even higher.
That’s why the most advanced solutions integrate advanced flow encryption, strict access control and complete isolation of environments. One of the key tools: the data lineage integrated in each step of the data cycle for a precise monitoring of uses.
3 – Enhanced governance
With the proliferation of data and increased regulatory requirements, organizations must automate their governance. An intelligent Data Catalog automatically classifies information and applies the rules of compliance by design. Users rely on reliable data in a compliant environment and avoid handling errors.
Thanks to alert features, Data managers, as well as Business users if they are recipients, can detect in real time any anomaly or evolution impacting the key indicators.
4 – Real autonomy for Business Users, a gain in productivity for the organization
The Data Catalog puts the data back into the hands of business and operational managers, reducing the time spent on research and preparation. Using embedded AI, it automatically establishes intelligent links between data sets, detects and corrects inconsistencies, and automates classification to ensure compliance and confidentiality.
Companies adopting this solution accelerate their transition to a data-driven organization, while ensuring reliable operation and compliance with regulatory requirements.
5 – A strategic pivot for decision-making
An intelligent Data Catalog enhances the agility of organizations. Embedded AI accelerates data exploration and usage while adding an additional layer of security to the initial configuration.
For financial management, the smart data catalog allows to adjust the strategy in real time and to balance the income statement. By combining internal data (financial data) and external data (market, exchange rate, seasonality), it anticipates changes in profitability. Integrated AI detects anomalies or inefficiencies in operational costs, helping the user to identify hidden costs. It also automates forecasts, providing accurate projections of the evolution of revenues and expenses. Finally, by classifying data, it optimizes profitability by segment by identifying the most profitable products or services and those that require adjustments.
For marketing and sales teams, the intelligent data catalog is a strategic lever to improve the loyalty plan. By aggregating data from multiple sources (purchases, interactions, feedbacks), it creates complete and dynamic customer profiles. Therefore, the AI identifies individual preferences and suggests personalized offers. It analyses behaviour and interactions to anticipate departures and recommend preventive actions (targeted offers, reminders). Correlated to campaign KPIs, the AI-assisted user can recognize the most effective channels and messages to streamline marketing budget allocation.
More free and better equipped than ever, the Business users are becoming key players in the continuous improvement of services, in a reactive or even proactive way, without relying on technical teams or data. In an ecosystem where information is abundant, and where it is more strategic than ever, choosing a smart data catalog is now obvious.
Thanks to our Product Expert, Nicolas Vaillier, for this lighting and his specialist advice. An expert opinion to be found on all 15 media of the ITR Group, among others (click on the links to access the media) Info DSI, ITR News, ITR Manager, La Vie Numérique, Tendances IT, L’Entreprise connectée ...
