Great Data Governance Starts Here - Introducing Analytics Console

We’re excited to announce, Analytics Console, our latest innovation bringing embedded data governance to our industry leading Data Analytics platform. We know how large and challenging an effort data governance can be. When you’ve gone through the effort to establish a data platform, the last thing you need is to start from scratch or work with bolted-on solutions to keep all that hard work documented.

Our product lead–and former IR practitioner–Aimee Cook shares why she’s so excited for Analytics Console. And let’s just say, she’s been there for her share of data governance headaches.

1. What is Analytics Console? Why did you want to build it?

Data governance has been a prevalent topic to analytics for years now; it is critical to supporting the successful implementation and application of an analytics solution. At HelioCampus we wanted to ensure we provided tools to support our partner institutions in their analytics deployment, which extends beyond facilitating the technical infrastructure. 

As a part of our technology solution we found that the data dictionary we were providing didn’t go far enough. That’s really where Analytics Console comes in.

Analytics Console was designed to provide a resource to capture and manage institutional definitions which are frequently discussed, reviewed and agreed upon during our implementation process. It helps inform the discussions by being pre-populated with standard definitions–grounded in the work from numerous client implementations–and clients can later capture agreed upon definitions.

This customization is particularly important when an institution needs to change either the source data or definition to align with what everyone agrees upon. Further, because our platform balances a standard data model with flexibility to respond to institutional nuances, it is important that we, as a company, give our partners visibility into those customizations to ensure clarity and promote trust.

2. When you think about your experience in IR as a practitioner, how did that help influence the functionality you wanted to prioritize in Analytics Console? 

As an IR practitioner, I felt it was important to facilitate data conversations in a way that allowed my colleagues to discuss use cases; data sources and definitions; and data ownership. When I thought about Analytics Console, I knew it needed to have all of the information about your data in one location. 

Not to mention, I needed to make sure that agreed upon changes would be easily documented–no more post-its on my screen! Analytics Console now ensures all changes are captured in the definitions for each field. 

And finally, I never liked being asked a question I couldn’t answer or find the answer to. When I thought about Analytics Console, I knew the platform manager and custom code available needed to help teams quickly find the answers they need to respond to their internal stakeholders.

3. How can IR and IT teams use Analytics Console today?

My hope is that Analytics Console helps IR and IT teams have productive conversations where they can talk the same language, gain a mutual understanding of their data and work to build the foundation of their institution’s approach to data governance. IR can help IT by supporting and representing their work across the organization. IT can help IR by communicating changes or updates that would have an impact on how data can be used.

4. How does Analytics Console support the data governance process at institutions?

In the end, data governance is a collection of activities that hopefully culminate in a shared understanding of definitions, appropriate use and sources of data. Going through the process of an Analytics platform implementation, as our clients have done (and future clients will do), helps to facilitate those conversations; surfacing data nuances, helping to codify business rules and giving access to dashboards for data consumption and use. 

The Analytics Console helps to capture the nuances, coding and end user definitions of the data that are made available. Because it is deeply integrated with the HelioCampus Data Analytics technology stack-specifically Theia, our trusted data layer-it surfaces technical details, like field lineage, and simplifies the documentation process.

Analytics Console also provides standard definitions that give institutions a starting point, and definitions can be accessed from dashboards creating unified end user experience.

5. What’s next for Analytics Console? 

The possibilities are endless! We will continue to focus on supporting data governance processes and documentation. We are exploring extending the “data about the data” that can be added to Analytics Console and exploring some options that would extend the boundaries of the Console.

Ultimately, Analytics Console will be essential to support the building and maintaining of the semantic layer for institutions. More on the importance of the Semantic layer within the modern data platform, if you’re interested in the future of AI and data analytics! 

If your institution could use a jump start to their data governance efforts, please reach out to HelioCampus. We would love to talk with you about how an analytics initiative can be the perfect catalyst to drive forward critical conversations around data and work towards helping institutions build a data culture on campus.