Self-service analytics is increasingly important for enterprise competitiveness. A company’s business users won’t be able to perform self-service analytics effectively unless they can count on access to trusted and appropriate data sources. When fit-for-purpose data sets can be surfaced on-the-fly and recommended to business end users for immediate access in a consumer-friendly form, they can spend their time on analysis rather than waste it on analyzing time is used to rather than wasted it on searching for credible data.

The backbone of self-service analytics is a metadata-informed catalog that provides a single, coordinated, and trusted source of data intelligence—whether that data resides on-premise, in the cloud, both or across multiple clouds.

Smart catalogs put data into context for end users so that they can draw upon not just good data but the right data for the particular analytics requirement. This depends in large part on a solution’s ability to automatically tag digital assets for immediate classification.