By now you would have heard about the launch of SAP Datasphere, a business data fabric architecture that uniquely harmonizes mission-critical data throughout the organization. It brings together previously discrete capabilities for providing a unified, integrated, and intelligent end-to-end data platform coupled with an open data ecosystem.
Overview
We are excited to introduce SAP Datasphere catalog as part of our SAP Datasphere launch. It’s one of the features that we are bringing together as part of single service to simplify your data landscape no matter where the data resides.
Catalog is a comprehensive solution that collects and organizes your metadata and data assets to enable all users, from business to technical, the ability to unlock the full potential of your enterprise data. The solution helps you to rapidly discover, understand relationships, and view lineage for faster data to value and confident data-driven decision making.
SAP Datasphere catalog helps discover, organize and curate data to drive confident decision making.
In this blog, I will share why you should consider SAP Datasphere catalog, use cases that catalog serves and how you can get started with catalog in SAP Datasphere.
Table of Contents
- Catalog vision & added value for customers
- Use cases & personas
- Demo
- SAP Datasphere and Collibra partnership
- Roadmap and outlook
- Get started
1. Catalog vision and added value for customers
Every organization wants to democratize data access and empower employees to make data-driven decisions; with confidence that data is trusted. But executing on that strategy is a constant challenge. With increasingly broad technology stack in organizations; the number of distinct data sources expand constantly, new datasets are spun up ad-hoc to answer the next question, and usually done in silos, lacking a holistic business context.
This is where Catalog helps in to discover, curate and organize metadata for running an effective metadata governance program. It empowers organization in their data governance journey by connecting to various data sources and enable users to search, classify, enrich assets with business glossary, tags, and data lineage & impact analysis capabilities.
SAP Datasphere catalog landing page
Our vision is to build a catalog rich with SAP application metadata. You can start using the catalog for metadata extraction from SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Datasphere tenant to empower trustworthy decision making. Later this year, the catalog is planned to include metadata extraction from SAP business applications and sources. We plan to bring the best of catalog capabilities available in our portfolio to the SAP Datasphere catalog so that customers can run end to end data governance.
Another key highlight of SAP Datasphere is it will provide an open ecosystem to integrate with leading 3rd party catalog vendors. We cover our catalog launch partnership later in the blog.
2. Usecases and personas
Various personas can come together to collaborate and benefit from SAP Datasphere catalog. Below we list the main use cases.
SAP Datasphere catalog personas
1) Simplified view of data landscapes – Catalog can be connected to various sources starting with SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Datasphere tenant and help maintain an inventory of all data assets in the organization. This is key to getting to know the data expanse and drive data quality and governance initiatives.
2) Quality data modelling – Today data is not only used for driving internal decision making but also taking new offerings to market for gaining a competitive edge. Catalog allows you to look at all assets including BW bridge artifacts, assets created in spaces and data products in SAP Datasphere tenant. This provides a bird’s eye view and drive quality data modelling for internal and external use cases for customers.
3) Self-service and data discovery – This can be established as a go to place to find any data and analytics so that users can focus on working with data to solve business problems rather than spending time to see if there is any data available, who can provide access etc. This is great help for modelers in SAP Datasphere as today they only see data available to them in spaces they are assigned to. The capabilities around search, filtering and browsing capabilities help in finding the data.
4) Boost trust in data – Lineage and impact analysis capabilities provide understanding of where data came from and how is it being combined to arrive at business ready artifacts like stories. This serves dual purpose – data analysts have confidence that they are using the right dataset and verify data provenance and for data modelers, they can judge the impact of changes they make to assets to avoid any business disruption. We all have been in situations where changes in model have broken reports 🙂
5) Metadata governance – A common metadata governance framework can be defined with the catalog. Data steward personas responsible for various units can classify data, enrich information, and certify the assets using tags to denote purposes and context in which data can be utilized.
6) Data literacy – Catalog can help bridge the gap between technical and business perspective by establishing a business glossary to explain the different terms, what do they mean and add additional context when evaluating a data artifact for use case at hand. So, when somebody says product or customer entity, there’s a common language that everyone can speak.
7) Goals and KPI alignment – In Catalog, users can define the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), explain the calculation and thresholds that apply for goal achievement. This provides modelers and data analysts valuable information on creating assets faster and avoid back and forth on coming to a common understanding.
8) Holistic view of analytic & planning processes – SAP Datasphere customers who run SAP Analytics Cloud benefit from having end to end lineage of data and analytic assets and knowing that data is coming from trusted sources can confidently solve for analytic and planning related business requirements.
I hope above provides food for thought on use cases that can be realized with catalog in SAP Datasphere. The most important aspect for success for any data governance program is collaboration. In Catalog, various personas can be empowered to play their part in realizing organization’s vision of being data-driven.
3. Demo
Here is a demo of catalog capabilities of SAP Datasphere in action. Demo is focusing on an end user persona for discovering, understanding, and consuming the data.
4. SAP Datasphere and Collibra partnership
Part of our strategy of a business data fabric is to include an ecosystem of partners to offer an open data platform for our customers. Our goal is to build the best catalog with SAP application metadata . In addition, we recognize that customers’ data landscapes include non-SAP data and that customers have a strong need to unify data.
We are partnering with Collibra for bi-directional metadata exchange so that our customers can run end–to-end data governance with SAP and non-SAP data using SAP Datasphere Catalog and Collibra side by side.
Please stay tuned for additional information about this partnership and product integration.
5. Roadmap and outlook
We will keep delivering on use cases making SAP Datasphere experience meaningful for our customers. Focus is to connect more SAP sources for business rich metadata extraction starting with SAP BW, SAP ECC and SAP S/4. You will also see items for supporting open ecosystem for metadata exchange with Collibra.
See roadmap explorer linked below for up-to-date information.
6. Get started
This capability is available in all existing tenants and can be activated by assigning the appropriate Catalog roles in the system. New prospective customers can trial the SAP Datasphere tenant – links below.
Summary
Our goal is to unify all mission critical data without losing context and we will be serving more use cases around data quality and data governance as we go further in this journey.
Catalog features in SAP Datasphere can kickstart your journey to provide governance and trust around data. Make sure to give it a try today. We would love to hear your feedback and answer questions – please comment down below.
Links:
- SAP Datasphere launch blog
- SAP Datasphere catalog demo link
- Help documentation for catalog
- Roadmap for catalog features in SAP Datasphere
- Try SAP Datasphere using Free tier on SAP BTP
- Blog by my colleague on Importance of Data catalog
