The enterprise graph is one of the most strategic data assets to enable IT departments to improve data governance. With companies like Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Box making strides with their respective enterprise graph technology, it’s time for organizations to get on board and leverage the power of graph technology to uncover hidden business insights.
However, since this graph is new, many IT practitioners don’t yet understand what it can deliver, let alone how to get started. Let’s fix that.
Enterprise users are increasingly connecting to cloud service providers to perform their daily business tasks, through clouds such as Office 365, Box, or Salesforce. Having visibility across many users and services, the cloud provider can build a dynamic map of relationships between people and the data they use for their jobs. When services are distributed across many application installations in an organization’s on-premises data center, visibility across multiple services is simply not practical or possible. The move to intelligent clouds with associated graph databases affords a new generation of data analysis that simply was not previously available.
This enhanced visibility leads to better collaboration and enhanced worker productivity. Another less talked about benefit is its ability to improve data governance. Because the graph and intelligent graph-based apps can dynamically learn and update the dependencies between people, topics and other projects, and conversations happening in the cloud, they have the power to surface relevant information while respecting established data governance policies. Here are three ways that the enterprise graph can help organizations improve data governance:
1. REDUCE INFORMATION OVERLOAD An enterprise graph can help information workers focus. Rather than overwhelming workers with streams of cloud updates organized by apps, an enterprise graph and associated intelligent apps can organize and deliver in-formation by topics. An enterprise graph that incorporates the relationships between people, topics, and cloud events provides the foundation of the next generation of cloud-based, intelligent applications. This enables in-formation workers to discover content the way people think—by topics and associated topics—rather than creating informational silos and then trying to remember in which app important data is stored.
2. SECURITY A recent AIIM Research survey found that 73 percent of organizations don’t have information governance policies at all, and of those that do, 23 percent report that theirs is chaotic. While having the right policies in place is a necessary first step, the graph is able to expose—or not expose—important topics that people would have otherwise missed. These topics can complement the existing taxonomy and uncover the defacto organization taxonomy. Because the graph respects data governance policies, exposed information is automatically security trimmed. With the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in full swing, it’s more important now than ever to be able to efficiently process data—whether that means storing, destroying, or accessing it at a moment’s notice. The graph makes it easier to weed through information and reduce information overload in the process.
3. SMART NOTIFICATIONS Oftentimes, especially in larger organizations, different people benefit from being exposed to the same information. Traditionally, finding this would be a manual and not very efficient process. The benefit of the graph is that if people in different departments have shared interests, the graph can make them aware of relevant information that exists—information they previously would have missed. By capturing the dependency between information connected through the same topic, the graph can then deliver meaningful notifications pertaining to that topic. This makes it easier to find and share interesting information across the organization.In most organizations today, workers feel over-whelmed by the amount of information they’re dealing with on a daily basis. Enterprise graph technology reduces the cognitive burden associated with trying to locate important information to get work done by presenting users with the most valuable information to them, when they need it, and in a secure way.
