Data curation helps break down silos and improve efficiency

In this age of information, access to copious amounts of data from every source imaginable has become a gift and a curse. Knowing that you have the data to support nearly any decision brings a great sense of security. However, many organizations struggle with operationalizing big data for it to be used throughout the organization in aiding critical decision-making processes.
When data isn’t made available to decision makers in a way that is useful, organizations risk operating on inaccurate information, incorrect guidelines, and incomplete knowledge - all of which can have a negative impact on the effectiveness of a business and lead to inaccurate decisions. Good decision-making is based on having the right information. Therefore, we must ensure that decision-makers have access to accurate data through the practice of data curation.

What’s data curation?

Data curation is the management of data by making it more available and useful for those engaged in data discovery and analysis. It involves authentication, archiving, management, preservation, retrieval, and representation of data.
Data curators integrate data from diverse sources into repositories so that users can cross-reference data, thereby inferring more valuable information than from individual sets of data.
They look at social signals, such as how people interact with the information, to interpret and customize the data sets.
They also conduct active management throughout the entire data lifecycle, which includes the conceptualizing, creating, accessing, using, appraising, selecting, disposing, ingesting, reappraising, storing, reusing, and transforming data to ensure long-term value and mitigate digital obsolescence.

Why do we need data curation?

Data curation enhances the longevity and long-term value of existing data by making it available for further research and analysis.
Such high-quality data serves as the foundation for many business decision-making processes and enhances the power of many analytics tools and processes:

• AI and machine learning: Even though these technologies have come a long way, we still need human input in the form of curated data to direct algorithmic behavior towards effective learning and data interpretation.
• Data lake: Data curation allows for the easy access to raw data and the flexibility to ask ambiguous business-driven questions.
• Audience education: Data curation helps educate end users by helping them make sense of the data available.
• Data quality: The process of data curation ensures the long-term preservation and retention of the authoritative nature of digital information.
• Collaborative ecosystem: The availability of high-quality data helps speed up innovation through knowledge sharing and data socialization.

Harness the power of data curation

To make data curation work for your organization, you need an environment in which all stakeholders can tap into the information and leverage it to aid in critical decision-making processes.
Altair Knowledge Hub’s centralized data marketplace makes data curation simple for data stewards. It also helps break down silos by allowing everyone in your organization to access curated data sets, reports, models, workspaces, and expertise - all of which are synchronized real time.
Data socialization helps augment the power of human-powered data curation by fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making. There’s also a layer of machine learning-driven curation - Knowledge Hub provides intelligent recommendations on data that should be viewed and used based on a user’s past activity.
Controlled collaboration and governance ensures the proper access and usage of the most relevant data sets.