Search for:
Future-Proofing AI Under a Federal Umbrella: What a 10-Year State Regulation Freeze Means


The federal government’s proposal to impose a 10-year freeze on state-level AI regulation isn’t happening in a vacuum but in direct response to California. The state’s AI Accountability Act (SB 1047) has been making waves for its ambition to hold developers of powerful AI models accountable through mandatory safety testing, public disclosures, and the creation of a new regulatory […]

The post Future-Proofing AI Under a Federal Umbrella: What a 10-Year State Regulation Freeze Means appeared first on DATAVERSITY.


Read More
Author: Dev Nag

External Data Strategy: From Vision to Vendor Selection (Part 1)


In today’s data-driven business environment, the ability to leverage external information sources has become a critical differentiator between market leaders and laggards. Organizations that successfully harness external data don’t just gather more information – they transform how they understand their customers, anticipate market shifts, and identify growth opportunities. However, the path from recognizing the need for […]

The post External Data Strategy: From Vision to Vendor Selection (Part 1) appeared first on DATAVERSITY.


Read More
Author: Subasini Periyakaruppan

Data Contracts, AI Search, and More: Actian’s Spring ’25 Product Launch

This blog introduces Actian’s Spring 2025 launch, featuring 15 new capabilities that improve data governance, observability, productivity, and end-to-end integration across the data stack.

  • Actian’s new federated data contracts give teams full control over distributed data product creation and lifecycle management.
  • Ask AI and natural language search integrations boost productivity for business users across BI tools and browsers.
  • Enhanced observability features deliver real-time alerts, SQL-based metrics, and auto-generated incident tickets to reduce resolution time.

Actian’s Spring 2025 launch introduces 15 powerful new capabilities across our cloud and on-premises portfolio that help modern data teams navigate complex data landscapes while delivering ongoing business value.

Whether you’re a data steward working to establish governance at the source, a data engineer seeking to reduce incident response times, or a business leader looking to optimize data infrastructure costs, these updates deliver immediate, measurable impact.

What’s new in the Actian Cloud Portfolio

Leading this launch is an upgrade to our breakthrough data contract first functionality that enables true decentralized data management with enterprise-wide federated governance, allowing data producers to build and publish trusted data assets while maintaining centralized control. Combined with AI-powered natural language search through Ask AI and enhanced observability with custom SQL metrics, our cloud portfolio delivers real value for modern data teams.

Actian Data Intelligence

Decentralized Data Management Without Sacrificing Governance

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform (formerly Zeenea) now supports a complete data products and contracts workflow. Achieve scalable, decentralized data management by enabling individual domains to design, manage, and publish tailored data products into a federated data marketplace for broader consumption.

Combined with governance-by-design through data contracts integrated into CI/CD pipelines, this approach ensures governed data from source to consumption, keeping metadata consistently updated. 

Organizations no longer need to choose between development velocity and catalog accuracy; they can achieve both simultaneously. Data producers who previously spent hours on labor-intensive tasks can now focus on quickly building data products, while business users gain access to consistently trustworthy data assets with clear contracts for proper usage. 

Ask AI Transforms How Teams Find and Understand Data

Ask AI, an AI-powered natural language query system, changes how users interact with their data catalog. Users can ask questions in plain English and receive contextually relevant results with extractive summaries.

This semantic search capability goes far beyond traditional keyword matching. Ask AI understands the intent, searches across business glossaries and data models, and returns not just matching assets but concise summaries that directly answer the question. The feature automatically identifies whether users are asking questions versus performing keyword searches, adapting the search mechanism accordingly.

Business analysts no longer need to rely on data engineers to interpret data definitions, and new team members can become productive immediately without extensive training on the data catalog.

Chrome Extension Brings Context Directly to Your Workflow

Complementing Ask AI, our new Chrome Extension automatically highlights business terms and KPIs within BI tools. When users hover over highlighted terms, they instantly see standardized definitions pulled directly from the data catalog, without leaving their reports or dashboards.

For organizations with complex BI ecosystems, this feature improves data literacy while ensuring consistent interpretation of business metrics across teams.

Enhanced Tableau and Power BI Integration

Our expanded BI tool integration provides automated metadata extraction and detailed field-to-field lineage for both Tableau and Power BI environments.

For data engineers managing complex BI environments, this eliminates the manual effort required to trace data lineage across reporting tools. When business users question the accuracy of a dashboard metric, data teams can now provide complete lineage information in seconds.

Actian Data Observability

Custom SQL Metrics Eliminate Data Blind Spots

Actian Data Observability now supports fully custom SQL metrics. Unlike traditional observability tools that limit monitoring to predefined metrics, this capability allows teams to create unlimited metric time series using the full expressive power of SQL.

The impact on data reliability is immediate and measurable. Teams can now detect anomalies in business-critical metrics before they affect downstream systems or customer-facing applications. 

Actionable Notifications With Embedded Visuals

When data issues occur, context is everything. Our enhanced notification system now embeds visual representations of key metrics directly within email and Slack alerts. Data teams get immediate visual context about the severity and trend of issues without navigating to the observability tool.

This visual approach to alerting transforms incident response workflows. On-call engineers can assess the severity of issues instantly and prioritize their response accordingly. 

Automated JIRA Integration and a new Centralized Incident Management Hub

Every detected data incident now automatically creates a JIRA ticket with relevant context, metrics, and suggested remediation steps. This seamless integration ensures no data quality issues slip through the cracks while providing a complete audit trail for compliance and continuous improvement efforts.

Mean time to resolution (MTTR) improves dramatically when incident tickets are automatically populated with relevant technical context, and the new incident management hub facilitates faster diagnosis and resolution.

Redesigned Connection Flow Empowers Distributed Teams

Managing data connections across large organizations has always been a delicate balance between security and agility. Our redesigned connection creation flow addresses this challenge by enabling central IT teams to manage credentials and security configurations while allowing distributed data teams to manage their data assets independently.

This decoupled approach means faster time-to-value for new data initiatives without compromising security or governance standards.

Expanded Google Cloud Storage Support

We’ve added wildcard support for Google Cloud Storage file paths, enabling more flexible monitoring of dynamic and hierarchical data structures. Teams managing large-scale data lakes can now monitor entire directory structures with a single configuration, automatically detecting new files and folders as they’re created.

What’s New in the Actian On-Premises Portfolio

Our DataConnect 12.4 release delivers powerful new capabilities for organizations that require on-premises data management solutions, with enhanced automation, privacy protection, and data preparation features.

DataConnect v12.4

Automated Rule Creation with Inspect and Recommend

The new Inspect and Recommend feature analyzes datasets and automatically suggests context-appropriate quality rules.

This capability addresses one of the most significant barriers to effective data quality management: the time and expertise required to define comprehensive quality rules for diverse datasets. Instead of requiring extensive manual analysis, users can now generate, customize, and implement effective quality rules directly from their datasets in minutes.

Advanced Multi-Field Conditional Rules

We now support multi-field, conditional profiling and remediation rules, enabling comprehensive, context-aware data quality assessments. These advanced rules can analyze relationships across multiple fields, not just individual columns, and automatically trigger remediation actions when quality issues are detected.

For organizations with stringent compliance requirements, this capability is particularly valuable. 

Data Quality Index Provides Executive Visibility

The new Data Quality Index feature provides a simple, customizable dashboard that allows non-technical stakeholders to quickly understand the quality level of any dataset. Organizations can configure custom dimensions and weights for each field, ensuring that quality metrics align with specific business priorities and use cases.

Instead of technical quality metrics that require interpretation, the Data Quality Index provides clear, business-relevant indicators that executives can understand and act upon.

Streamlined Schema Evolution

Our new data preparation functionality enables users to augment and standardize schemas directly within the platform, eliminating the need for separate data preparation tools. This integrated approach offers the flexibility to add, reorder, or standardize data as needed while maintaining data integrity and supporting scalable operations.

Flexible Masking and Anonymization

Expanded data privacy capabilities provide sophisticated masking and anonymization options to help organizations protect sensitive information while maintaining data utility for analytics and development purposes. These capabilities are essential for organizations subject to regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and PCI-DSS.

Beyond compliance requirements, these capabilities enable safer data sharing with third parties, partners, and research teams. 

Take Action

The post Data Contracts, AI Search, and More: Actian’s Spring ’25 Product Launch appeared first on Actian.


Read More
Author: Dee Radh

Tackling Complex Data Governance Challenges in the Banking Industry

The banking industry is one of the most heavily regulated sectors, and as financial services evolve, the challenges of managing, governing, and ensuring compliance with vast amounts of information have grown exponentially. With the introduction of stringent regulations, increasing data privacy concerns, and growing customer expectations for seamless service, banks face complex data governance challenges. These challenges include managing large volumes of sensitive data, maintaining data integrity, ensuring compliance with regulatory frameworks, and improving data transparency for both internal and external stakeholders.

In this article, we explore the core data governance challenges faced by the banking industry and how the Actian Data Intelligence Platform helps banking organizations navigate these challenges. From ensuring compliance with financial regulations to improving data transparency and integrity, the platform offers a comprehensive solution to help banks unlock the true value of their data while maintaining robust governance practices.

The Data Governance Landscape in Banking

The financial services sector generates and manages massive volumes of data daily, spanning customer accounts, transactions, risk assessments, compliance checks, and much more. Managing this data effectively and securely is vital to ensure the smooth operation of financial institutions and to meet regulatory and compliance requirements. Financial institutions must implement robust data governance to ensure data quality, security, integrity, and transparency.

At the same time, banks must balance regulatory requirements, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction. This requires implementing systems that can handle increasing amounts of data while maintaining compliance with local and international regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, Basel III, and MiFID II.

Key Data Governance Challenges in the Banking Industry

Below are some common hurdles and challenges facing organizations in the banking industry.

Data Privacy and Protection

With the rise of data breaches and increasing concerns about consumer privacy, banks are under immense pressure to safeguard sensitive customer information. Regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have made data protection a top priority for financial institutions. Ensuring that data is appropriately stored, accessed, and shared is vital for compliance, but it’s also vital for maintaining public trust.

Regulatory Compliance

Banks operate in a highly regulated environment, where compliance with numerous financial regulations is mandatory. Financial regulations are continuously evolving, and keeping up with changes in the law requires financial institutions to adopt efficient data governance practices that allow them to demonstrate compliance.

For example, Basel III outlines requirements for the management of banking risk and capital adequacy, while MiFID II requires detailed reporting on market activities and transaction records. In this landscape, managing compliance through data governance is no small feat.

Data Silos and Fragmentation

Many financial institutions operate in a fragmented environment, where data is stored across multiple systems, databases, and departments. This lack of integration can make it difficult to access and track data effectively. For banks, this fragmentation into data silos complicates the management of data governance processes, especially when it comes to ensuring data accuracy, consistency, and completeness.

Data Transparency and Integrity

Ensuring the integrity and transparency of data is a major concern in the banking industry. Banks need to be able to trace the origins of data, understand how it’s been used and modified, and provide visibility into its lifecycle. This is particularly important for audits, regulatory reporting, and risk management processes.

Operational Efficiency

As financial institutions grow and manage increasing amounts of data, operational efficiency in data management becomes increasingly challenging. Ensuring compliance with regulations, conducting audits, and reporting on data use can quickly become burdensome without the right data governance tools in place. Manual processes are prone to errors and inefficiencies, which can have costly consequences for banks.

How the Actian Data Intelligence Platform Tackles Data Governance Challenges in the Banking Industry

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform is designed to help organizations tackle the most complex data governance challenges. With its comprehensive set of tools, The platform supports banks by helping ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, improving data transparency and integrity, and creating a more efficient and organized data governance strategy.

Here’s how the Actian Data Intelligence Platform helps the banking industry overcome its data governance challenges.

1. Ensuring Compliance With Financial Regulations

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform helps banks achieve regulatory compliance by automating compliance monitoring, data classification, and metadata management.

  • Regulatory Compliance Automation: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform enables banks to automate compliance tracking and continuously monitor data access and usage. This helps banks ensure that they are consistently meeting the requirements of regulatory frameworks like GDPR, Basel III, MiFID II, and others. The Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s compliance monitoring tools also automatically flag any data access or changes to data that may violate compliance rules, giving banks the ability to react quickly and mitigate risks.
  • Data Classification for Compliance: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform allows banks to classify and categorize data based on its sensitivity and compliance requirements. By tagging data with relevant metadata, such as classification labels (e.g., personal data, sensitive data, financial data), The Actian Data Intelligence Platform ensures that sensitive information is handled in accordance with regulatory standards.
  • Audit Trails and Reporting: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s audit trail functionality creates comprehensive logs of data access, usage, and modifications. These logs are crucial for financial institutions when preparing for audits or responding to regulatory inquiries. The Actian Data Intelligence Platform automates the creation of compliance reports, making it easier for banks to demonstrate their adherence to regulatory standards.

2. Improving Data Transparency and Integrity

Data transparency and integrity are critical for financial institutions, particularly when it comes to meeting regulatory requirements for reporting and audit purposes. The Actian Data Intelligence Platform offers tools that ensure data is accurately tracked and fully transparent, which helps improve data governance practices within the bank.

  • Data Lineage: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s data lineage functionality provides a visual map of how data flows through the bank’s systems, helping stakeholders understand where the data originated, how it has been transformed, and where it is currently stored. This is essential for transparency, especially when it comes to auditing and compliance reporting.
  • Metadata Management: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s metadata management capabilities enable banks to organize, track, and maintain metadata for all data assets across the organization. This not only improves transparency but also ensures that data is properly classified and described, reducing the risk of errors and inconsistencies. With clear metadata, banks can ensure that data is correctly used and maintained across systems.
  • Data Quality Monitoring: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform continuously monitors data quality, ensuring that data remains accurate, complete, and consistent across systems. Data integrity is crucial for banks, as decisions made based on poor-quality data can lead to financial losses, reputational damage, and non-compliance.

3. Eliminating Data Silos and Improving Data Integration

Fragmented data and siloed systems are a common challenge for financial institutions. Data often resides in disparate databases or platforms across different departments, making it difficult to access and track efficiently. The platform provides the tools to integrate data governance processes and eliminate silos.

  • Centralized Data Catalog: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform offers a centralized data catalog that enables banks to consolidate and organize all their data assets using a single platform. This centralized repository improves the discoverability of data across departments and systems, helping banks streamline data access and reduce inefficiencies.
  • Cross-Department Collaboration: With the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, departments across the organization can collaborate on data governance. By centralizing governance policies, data access, and metadata, The Actian Data Intelligence Platform encourages communication between data owners, stewards, and compliance officers to ensure that data governance practices are consistent across the institution.

4. Enhancing Operational Efficiency

Manual processes in data governance can be time-consuming and prone to errors, making it challenging for banks to keep pace with the growing volumes of data and increasing regulatory demands. The Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s platform automates and streamlines key aspects of data governance, allowing banks to work more efficiently and focus on higher-value tasks.

  • Automation of Compliance Monitoring: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform automates compliance checks, data audits, and reporting, which reduces the manual workload for compliance teams. Automated alerts and reports help banks quickly identify potential non-compliance issues and rectify them before they escalate.
  • Workflow Automation: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform enables banks to automate workflows around data governance processes, including data classification, metadata updates, and access management. By streamlining these workflows, The Actian Data Intelligence Platform ensures that banks can efficiently manage their data governance tasks without relying on manual intervention.
  • Data Access Control: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform helps banks define and enforce fine-grained access controls for sensitive data. With The Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s robust access control mechanisms, banks can ensure that only authorized personnel can access specific data, reducing the risk of data misuse and enhancing operational security.

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform and the Banking Industry: A Perfect Partnership

The banking industry faces a range of complex data governance challenges. To navigate these challenges, they need robust data governance frameworks and powerful tools to help manage their vast data assets.

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform offers a comprehensive data governance solution that helps financial institutions tackle these challenges head-on. By providing automated compliance monitoring, metadata tracking, data lineage, and a centralized data catalog, the platform ensures that banks can meet regulatory requirements while improving operational efficiency, data transparency, and data integrity.

Actian offers an online product tour of the Actian Data Intelligence Platform as well as personalized demos of how the data intelligence platform can transform and enhance financial institutions’ data strategies.

The post Tackling Complex Data Governance Challenges in the Banking Industry appeared first on Actian.


Read More
Author: Actian Corporation

Data Is Risky Business: Sustainability and Resilience in Data Governance
This quarter’s column is co-authored with Anthony Mazzarella, a fellow practitioner-academic doing research into what makes data governance “tick.” There has been a lot of commentary on social media and elsewhere in recent months about how data governance has failed and how we need to reframe the discussion on what it means to govern data, […]


Read More
Author: Daragh O Brien

Thoughts on the DAMA DMBoK
Many years ago, I contributed material on Database Development and Database Operations Management to the first edition of DAMA International’s “Data Management Body of Knowledge” (the DAMA DMBoK).i Now that work has begun on the Third Edition of the DMBoK, I’d like to share a few thoughts and critiques on the DMBoK for consideration. Some […]


Read More
Author: Larry Burns

Legal Issues for Data Professionals: Preventive Healthcare and Data
This column addresses the role of data in the field of healthcare known as “preventive healthcare.” Preventive healthcare is undergoing changes as data increases its scope and the role it plays in healthcare.  What Is Preventive Healthcare and Its Data?     For the purpose of this article, traditional healthcare refers to patient care received from a […]


Read More
Author: William A. Tanenbaum

From Silos to Self-Service: Data Governance in the AI Era

As enterprises double down on AI, many are discovering an uncomfortable truth: their biggest barrier isn’t technology—it’s their data governance model.

While 79% of corporate strategists rank AI and analytics as critical, Gartner predicts that 60% will fall short of their goals because their governance frameworks can’t keep up.

Siloed data, ad hoc quality practices, and reactive compliance efforts create bottlenecks that stifle innovation and limit effective data governance. The future demands a different approach: data treated as a product, governance embedded in data processes including self-service experiences, and decentralized teams empowered by active metadata and intelligent automation.

From Data Silos to Data Products: Why Change is Urgent

Traditional data governance frameworks were not designed for today’s reality. Enterprises operate across hundreds, sometimes thousands, of data sources: cloud warehouses, lakehouses, SaaS applications, on-prem systems, and AI models all coexist in sprawling ecosystems.

Without a modern approach to managing and governing data, silos proliferate. Governance becomes reactive—enforced after problems occur—rather than proactive. And AI initiatives stumble when teams are unable to find trusted, high-quality data at the speed the business demands.

Treating data as a product offers a way forward. Instead of managing data purely as a siloed, domain-specific asset, organizations shift toward delivering valuable and trustworthy data products to internal and external consumers. Each data product has an owner and clear expectations for quality, security, and compliance.

This approach connects governance directly to business outcomes—driving more accurate analytics, more precise AI models, and faster, more confident decision-making.

Enabling Domain-Driven Governance: Distributed, Not Fragmented

Achieving this future requires rethinking the traditional governance model. Centralized governance teams alone cannot keep pace with the volume, variety, and velocity of data creation. Nor can fully decentralized models, where each domain sets its own standards without alignment.

The answer is federated governance, a model in which responsibility is distributed to domain teams but coordinated through a shared framework of policies, standards, and controls.

In a federated model:

  • Domain teams own their data products, from documentation to quality assurance to access management.
  • Central governance bodies set enterprise-wide guardrails, monitor compliance, and enable collaboration across domains.
  • Data intelligence platforms serve as the connective tissue, providing visibility, automation, and context across the organization.

This balance of autonomy and alignment ensures that governance scales with the organization—without becoming a bottleneck to innovation.

The Rise of Active Metadata and Intelligent Automation

Active metadata is the fuel that powers modern governance. Unlike traditional data catalogs and metadata repositories, which are often static and siloed, active metadata is dynamic, continuously updated, and operationalized into business processes.

By tapping into active metadata, organizations can:

  • Automatically capture lineage, quality metrics, and usage patterns across diverse systems.
  • Enforce data contracts between producers and consumers to ensure shared expectations.
  • Enable intelligent access controls based on data sensitivity, user role, and regulatory requirements.
  • Proactively detect anomalies, schema changes, and policy violations before they cause downstream issues.

When governance processes are fueled by real-time, automated metadata, they no longer slow the business down—they accelerate it.

Embedding Governance into Everyday Work

The ultimate goal of modern governance is to make high-quality data products easily discoverable, understandable, and usable, without requiring users to navigate bureaucratic hurdles.

This means embedding governance into self-service experiences with:

  • Enterprise data marketplaces where users browse, request, and access data products with clear SLAs and usage guidelines.
  • Business glossaries that standardize and enforce consistent data definitions across domains.
  • Interactive lineage visualizations that trace data from its source through each transformation stage in the pipeline.
  • Automated data access workflows that enforce granular security controls while maintaining compliance.

In this model, governance becomes an enabler, not an obstacle, to data-driven work.

Observability: Enabling Ongoing Trust

Data observability is a vital component of data governance for AI because it ensures the quality, integrity, and transparency of the data that powers AI models. By integrating data observability, organizations reduce AI failure rates, accelerate time-to-insight, and maintain alignment between model behavior.

Data observability improves data intelligence and helps to:

  • Ensure high-quality data is used for AI model training by continuously monitoring data pipelines, quickly detecting anomalies, errors, or bias before they impact AI outputs.
  • Provide transparency and traceability of data flow and transformations, which is essential for building trust, ensuring regulatory compliance, and demonstrating accountability in AI systems.
  • Reduce model bias by monitoring data patterns and lineage; data observability helps identify and address potential biases in datasets and model outputs. This is key to ensuring AI systems are fair, ethical, and do not perpetuate discrimination.
  • Improve model explainability by making it easier to understand and explain AI model behavior, providing insights into the data and features that influence model predictions.

Building for the Future: Adaptability is Key

The pace of technological change—especially in AI, machine learning, and data infrastructure—shows no signs of slowing. Regulatory environments are also evolving rapidly, from GDPR to CCPA to emerging AI-specific legislation.

To stay ahead, organizations must build governance frameworks with data intelligence tools that are flexible by design:

  • Flexible metamodeling capabilities to customize governance models as business needs evolve.
  • Open architectures that connect seamlessly across new and legacy systems.
  • Scalable automation to handle growing data volumes without growing headcount.
  • Cross-functional collaboration between governance, engineering, security, and business teams.

By building adaptability into the core of their governance strategy, enterprises can future-proof their investments and support innovation for years to come.

Conclusion: Turning Governance into a Competitive Advantage

Data governance is no longer about meeting minimum compliance requirements—it’s about driving business value and building a data-driven culture. Organizations that treat data as a product, empower domains with ownership, and activate metadata across their ecosystems will set the pace for AI-driven innovation. Those that rely on outdated, centralized models will struggle with slow decision-making, mounting risks, and declining trust. The future will be led by enterprises that embed governance into the fabric of how data is created, shared, and consumed—turning trusted data into a true business advantage.

The post From Silos to Self-Service: Data Governance in the AI Era appeared first on Actian.


Read More
Author: Nick Johnson

Data Owner vs. Data Steward: What’s the Difference?

Companies rely on data to make strategic decisions, improve operations, and drive innovation. However, with the growing volume and complexity of data, managing and maintaining its integrity, accessibility, and security has become a major challenge.

This is where the roles of data owners and data stewards come into play. Both are essential in the realm of data governance, but their responsibilities, focus areas, and tasks differ. Understanding the distinction between data owner vs. data steward is crucial for developing a strong data governance framework.

This article explores the differences between data owners and data stewards. It explains the importance of both roles in effective data management and shares how Actian can help both data owners and data stewards collaborate and manage data governance more efficiently.

What is a Data Owner?

A data owner is the individual or team within an organization who is ultimately responsible for a specific set of data. The data owner is typically a senior leader, department head, or business unit leader who has the authority over data within their domain.

Data owners are accountable for the data’s security, compliance, and overall business value. They are responsible for ensuring that data is used appropriately, securely, and per organizational policies and regulations.

Key responsibilities of a data owner include:

  1. Accountability for Data Security: Data owners are responsible for ensuring that data is protected and secure. This includes managing access permissions, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA, and working with IT teams to prevent data breaches.
  2. Defining Data Usage: Data owners determine how their data should be used within the organization. They help define the policies and rules that govern how data is accessed and shared, ensuring that data serves business needs without exposing the organization to risk.
  3. Compliance and Regulatory Requirements: Data owners must ensure that their data complies with relevant regulations and industry standards. They oversee audits and ensure that proper documentation and controls are in place to meet compliance requirements.
  4. Data Strategy Alignment: Data owners work closely with organizational leadership to ensure that the data aligns with broader business strategies and goals. They ensure that data is properly utilized to drive business growth, innovation, and decision-making.
  5. Data Access Control: Data owners have the authority to define who can access their data. They set up permissions and manage user roles to ensure that only authorized individuals can access sensitive or critical data.

What is a Data Steward?

While the data owner holds the ultimate responsibility for the data, the data steward is the individual who takes a more operational role in managing, maintaining, and improving data quality. Data stewards typically handle the day-to-day management and governance of data, ensuring that it’s accurate, complete, and properly classified.

They act as the custodian of data within the organization, working closely with data owners and other stakeholders to ensure that data is used effectively across different teams and departments.

Key responsibilities of a data steward include:

  1. Data Quality Management: Data stewards play a critical role in maintaining data quality. They are responsible for ensuring that data is accurate, complete, consistent, and up to date. This involves implementing data validation rules, monitoring data integrity, and addressing data quality issues as they arise.
  2. Metadata Management: Data stewards manage the metadata associated with data. This includes defining data definitions, data types, and relationships between datasets and data assets. By organizing and maintaining metadata, data stewards ensure that data can be easily understood and accessed by anyone in the organization who needs it.
  3. Data Classification and Standardization: Data stewards are involved in classifying data, tagging it with relevant metadata, and establishing data standards. This helps ensure that data is consistent, well-organized, and easily searchable.
  4. Collaboration with Data Users: Data stewards often work closely with data users, such as analysts, data scientists, and business units, to understand their needs and provide them with the appropriate resources. They help ensure that data is accessible, usable, and meets the specific needs of different departments.
  5. Data Lineage and Documentation: Data stewards maintain records of data lineage, which track the flow and transformation of data from its source to its destination. This helps ensure traceability and transparency, allowing users to understand where data comes from and how it has been modified over time.

Data Owner vs. Data Steward: Key Differences

While both data owners and data stewards are essential to effective data governance, their roles differ in terms of focus, responsibilities, and authority. Below is a comparison of data owner vs. data steward roles to highlight their distinctions:

  Data Owner Data Steward
Primary Responsibility Overall accountability for data governance and security. Day-to-day management, quality, and integrity of data.
Focus Strategic alignment, compliance, data usage, and access control. Operational focus on data quality, metadata management, and classification.
Authority Holds decision-making power on how data is used and shared. Executes policies and guidelines set by data owners, ensures data quality.
Collaboration Works with senior leadership, IT, legal, and compliance teams. Works with data users, IT teams, and data owners to maintain data quality.
Scope Oversees entire datasets or data domains. Focuses on the practical management and stewardship of data within domains.

Why Both Roles are Essential in Data Governance

Data owners and data stewards play complementary roles in maintaining a strong data governance framework. The success of data governance depends on a clear division of responsibilities between these roles:

  • Data owners provide strategic direction, ensuring that data aligns with business goals, complies with regulations, and is properly secured.
  • Data stewards ensure that the data is usable, accurate, and accessible on a daily basis, helping to operationalize the governance policies set by the data owners.

Together, they create a balance between high-level oversight and hands-on data management. This ensures that data is not only protected and compliant but also accessible, accurate, and valuable for the organization.

How Actian Supports Data Owners and Data Stewards

Actian offers a powerful data governance platform designed to support both data owners and data stewards in managing their responsibilities effectively. It provides tools that empower both roles to maintain high-quality, compliant, and accessible data while streamlining collaboration between these key stakeholders.

Here are six ways the Actian Data Intelligence Platform supports data owners and data stewards:

1. Centralized Data Governance

The centralized platform enables data owners and data stewards to manage their responsibilities in one place. Data owners can set governance policies, define data access controls, and ensure compliance with relevant regulations. Meanwhile, data stewards can monitor data quality, manage metadata, and collaborate with data users to maintain the integrity of data.

2. Data Lineage and Traceability

Data stewards can use the platform to track data lineage, providing a visual representation of how data flows through the organization. This transparency helps data stewards understand where data originates, how it’s transformed, and where it’s used, which is essential for maintaining data quality and ensuring compliance. Data owners can also leverage this lineage information to assess risk and ensure that data usage complies with business policies.

3. Metadata Management

Metadata management capabilities embedded in the platform allow data stewards to organize, manage, and update metadata across datasets. This ensures that data is well-defined and easily accessible for users. Data owners can use metadata to establish data standards and governance policies, ensuring consistency across the organization.

4. Automated Data Quality Monitoring

Data stewards can use the Actian Data Intelligence Platform to automate data quality checks, ensuring that data is accurate, consistent, and complete. By automating data quality monitoring, the platform reduces the manual effort required from data stewards and ensures that data remains high-quality at all times. Data owners can rely on these automated checks to assess the overall health of their data governance efforts.

5. Collaboration Tools

The platform fosters collaboration between data owners, data stewards, and other stakeholders through user-friendly tools. Both data owners and stewards can share insights, discuss data-related issues, and work together to address data governance challenges. This collaboration ensures that data governance policies are effectively implemented, and data is managed properly.

6. Compliance and Security

Data owners can leverage the platform to define access controls, monitor data usage, and ensure that data complies with industry regulations. Data stewards can use the platform to enforce these policies and maintain the security and integrity of data.

Data Owners and Stewards Can Tour the Platform to Experience Its Capabilities

Understanding the roles of data owner vs. data steward is crucial for establishing an effective data governance strategy. Data owners are responsible for the strategic oversight of data, ensuring its security, compliance, and alignment with business goals, while data stewards manage the day-to-day operations of data, focusing on its quality, metadata, and accessibility.

Actian supports both roles by providing a centralized platform for data governance, automated data quality monitoring, comprehensive metadata management, and collaborative tools. By enabling both data owners and data stewards to manage their responsibilities effectively, the platform helps organizations maintain high-quality, compliant, and accessible data, which is essential for making informed, data-driven decisions.

Tour the Actian Data Intelligence Platform or schedule a personalized demonstration of its capabilities today.

The post Data Owner vs. Data Steward: What’s the Difference? appeared first on Actian.


Read More
Author: Actian Corporation

Mind the Gap: AI-Driven Data and Analytics Disruption


We are at the threshold of the most significant changes in information management, data governance, and analytics since the inventions of the relational database and SQL. Most advances over the past 30 years have been the result of Moore’s Law: faster processing, denser storage, and greater bandwidth. At the core, though, little has changed. The basic […]

The post Mind the Gap: AI-Driven Data and Analytics Disruption appeared first on DATAVERSITY.


Read More
Author: Mark Cooper

Is the Scope of Data Governance Enough?
Data governance has long been the backbone of responsible data management, ensuring that organizations maintain high standards in data quality, security, and compliance. According to Jonathan Reichental in “Data Governance for Dummies,” the scope of governance extends well beyond data ownership and stewardship. It encompasses metadata, data architecture, master and reference data management, storage, integration, […]


Read More
Author: Myles Suer

Through the Looking Glass: On the Data (and Lack of Such) About Busking
I started playing cello in fourth grade, in the suburbs of Hartford, Conn. I can’t remember when I discovered that musicians played in the New York City streets and subways. But I recall that by high school, I had decided that would be the absolute coolest thing to do.  Sometime later, I learned that this […]


Read More
Author: Randall Gordon

Why Every Data-Driven Business Needs a Data Intelligence Platform

As data users can attest, success doesn’t come from having more data. It comes from having the right data. Yet for many organizations, finding this data can feel like trying to locate a specific book in a library without a catalog. You know the information is there, but without an organized way to locate it, you’re stuck guessing, hunting, or duplicating work. That’s where a data intelligence platform comes into play. This powerful but often underappreciated tool helps you organize, understand, and trust your data.

Whether you’re building AI applications, launching new analytics initiatives, or ensuring you meet compliance requirements, a well-implemented data intelligence platform can be the difference between success and frustration. That’s why they’ve become critical for modern businesses that want to ensure data products are easily searchable and available for all users. 

What is a Data Intelligence Platform?

At its core, a data intelligence platform offers a centralized inventory of your organization’s data assets. Think of it as a searchable index that helps data consumers—like analysts, data scientists, business users, and engineers—discover, understand, and trust the data they’re working with.

A data intelligence platform goes far beyond simple documentation and is more than a list of datasets. It’s an intelligent, dynamic system that organizes, indexes, and contextualizes your data assets across the enterprise. For innovative companies that rely on data to drive decisions, power AI initiatives, and deliver trusted business outcomes, it’s quickly becoming indispensable.

With a modern data intelligence platform, you benefit from:

  • Federated knowledge graph. Gain better search results—as simple as shopping on an online e-commerce site—along with visualization of data relationships, and enhanced data exploration
  • Robust metadata harvesting automation. See your entire data landscape, reduce manual documentation efforts, ensure current metadata, and power data discovery.
  • Graph-based business glossary. Drive GenAI and other use cases with high-quality business context, ensure consistent terminology across your organization, accelerate insights, and enable semantic search capabilities.
  • Smart data lineage. Have visibility into where data comes from, how it changes, and where it goes. Up-to-date lineage enhances compliance and governance while improving root cause analysis of data quality issues.
  • Unified data catalog and marketplace. Use Google-like search capabilities to locate and access data for intuitive user experiences, while ensuring governance with permission-controlled data products.
  • Ready-to-use data products and contracts. Accelerate data democratization, support governance without compromising agility, create contracts only when relevant data products exist, and support a shift-left approach to data quality and governance.
  • Comprehensive data quality and observability. Reduce data quality incidents, experience faster issue resolution and remediation​, increase your trust in data products​, and benefit from proactive quality management instead of firefighting issues.
  • AI + knowledge graph. Leverage the powerful combination to manage metadata, improve data discovery, and fuel agentic AI.

The result is a single source of truth that supports data discovery, fosters trust in data, and promotes governance without slowing innovation. Simply stated, a data intelligence platform connects people to trusted data. In today’s business environment when data volume, variety, and velocity are all exploding, that connection is critical.

5 Reasons Data Intelligence Platforms Matter More Than Ever

Traditional approaches to data management are quickly becoming obsolete because they cannot keep pace with fast-growing data volumes and new sources. You need a smart, fast way to make data available and usable—without losing control. Here’s how data intelligence platforms help:

  1. Eliminate data silos. One of the biggest challenges facing enterprises today is fragmentation. Data lives in multiple systems across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. Without a data intelligence platform, it’s hard to know what data exists, let alone who owns it, how it’s being used, or whether it can be trusted.

A data intelligence platform creates a single view of all enterprise data assets. It breaks down silos and enables better collaboration between business and IT teams.

  1. Accelerate analytics and AI. When analysts or data scientists spend more time finding, cleaning, or validating data than using it, productivity and innovation suffer. A data intelligence platform not only reduces time-to-insights but improves the quality of those insights by ensuring users start with accurate, trusted, connected data.

For AI initiatives, the value is even greater. Models are only as good as the data they’re trained on. Data intelligence platforms make it easier to identify high-quality, AI-ready data and track its lineage to ensure transparency and compliance.

  1. Enable Governance Without Slowing Processes. Organizations must meet data privacy regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA. A data intelligence platform can help teams understand where sensitive data resides, who has access to it, and how it flows across systems.

Unlike traditional governance methods, a data intelligence platform doesn’t create bottlenecks. It supports self-service access while enforcing data policies behind the scenes—balancing control and agility.

  1. Drive Trust and Data Literacy. One of the most underrated benefits of a data intelligence platform is cultural. By making data more transparent, accessible, and understandable, data intelligence platforms empower all users across your business, not just data specialists.

Data intelligence platforms often include business glossaries and definitions, helping users interpret data correctly and leverage it confidently. That’s a huge step toward building a data-literate organization.

  1. Empower Self-Service Analytics. A well-implemented data intelligence platform enables business users to search for and use data without waiting for IT or data teams to step in. This reduces delays and enables more people across the organization to make data-informed decisions. 

When users can confidently find and understand the data they need, they’re more likely to contribute to data-driven initiatives. This democratization of data boosts agility and fosters a culture of innovation where teams across departments can respond faster to market changes, customer needs, and operational challenges. A data intelligence platform turns data from a bottleneck into a catalyst for smarter, faster decisions.

Real-World Data Intelligence Platform Use Cases

Here are a few ways organizations are using data intelligence platforms:

  • A healthcare provider tracks patient data across systems and ensures compliance with health data privacy laws. Metadata tagging helps the compliance team identify where sensitive information lives and how it’s accessed.
  • A retail company accelerates analytics for marketing campaigns. Data analysts can quickly find the most up-to-date product, pricing, and customer data, without waiting for IT support.
  • A financial services firm relies on data lineage features in its data intelligence platform to trace the origin of critical reports. This audit trail helps the firm maintain regulatory compliance and improves internal confidence in reporting.
  • In manufacturing, engineers and analysts explore equipment data, maintenance logs, and quality metrics across systems to identify patterns that can reduce downtime and improve efficiency.

As more organizations embrace hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, data intelligence platforms are becoming part of an essential infrastructure for trusted, scalable data operations.

Optimize a Data Intelligence Platform

Implementing and fully leveraging a data intelligence platform isn’t just about buying the right technology. It requires the right strategy, governance, and user engagement. These tips can help you get started:

  • Define your goals and scope. Determine if you want to support self-service analytics, improve governance, prepare for AI initiatives, or undertake other use cases.
  • Start small, then scale. Focus on high-impact use cases first to build momentum and show value early, then scale your success.
  • Engage both business and technical users. A data intelligence platform is more than an IT tool and should be usable and provide value to business teams, too.
  • Automate metadata collection. Manual processes will not scale. Look for a data intelligence platform that can automatically keep metadata up to date.
  • Focus on data quality and observability. A platform is only as good as the data it manages. Integrate quality checks and data lineage tools to make sure users can trust what they find.

In a data-driven business, having data isn’t enough. You need to find it, trust it, and use it quickly and confidently. A modern data intelligence platform makes this possible.

Actian’s eBook “10 Traps to Avoid for a Successful Data Catalog Project” is a great resource to implement and fully optimize a modern solution. It provides practical guidance to help you avoid common pitfalls, like unclear ownership, low adoption rates for users, or underestimating data complexity, so your project delivers maximum value.

The post Why Every Data-Driven Business Needs a Data Intelligence Platform appeared first on Actian.


Read More
Author: Dee Radh

Unlocking Unstructured Data: Fueling AI with Insights


IDC reports that around 90% of the data in the digital world is unstructured. This encompasses data like PDFs, PowerPoints, emails and images, all containing valuable information that traditional structured databases can’t gather. As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more widespread, the importance of unstructured data grows. Businesses now face the challenge of organizing and utilizing these diverse data sources so AI models can fully leverage their potential, which is much easier said than done.  […]

The post Unlocking Unstructured Data: Fueling AI with Insights appeared first on DATAVERSITY.


Read More
Author: Philip Miller

Beyond Visibility: How Actian Data Observability Redefines the Standard

In today’s data-driven world, ensuring data quality, reliability, and trust has become a mission-critical priority. But as enterprises scale, many observability tools fall short, introducing blind spots, spiking cloud costs, or compromising compliance.

Actian Data Observability changes the game.

This blog explores how Actian’s next-generation observability capabilities outperform our competitors, offering unmatched scalability, cost-efficiency, and precision for modern enterprises.

Why Data Observability Matters Now More Than Ever

Data observability enables organizations to:

  • Detect data issues before they impact dashboards or models.
  • Build trust in analytics, AI, and regulatory reporting.
  • Maintain pipeline SLAs in complex architectures.
  • Reduce operational risk, rework, and compliance exposure.

Yet most tools still trade off depth for speed or precision for price. Actian takes a fundamentally different approach, offering full coverage without compromise.

What Actian Data Observability Provides

Actian Data Observability delivers on four pillars of enterprise value:

1. Achieve Proactive Data Reliability

Actian shifts data teams from reactive firefighting to proactive assurance. Through continuous monitoring, intelligent anomaly detection, and automated diagnostics, the solution enables teams to catch and often resolve data issues before they reach downstream systems—driving data trust at every stage of the pipeline.

2. Gain Predictable Cloud Economics

Unlike tools that cause unpredictable cost spikes from repeated scans and data movement, Actian’s zero-copy, workload-isolated architecture ensures stable, efficient operation. Customers benefit from low total cost of ownership without compromising coverage or performance.

3. Boost Data Team Productivity and Efficiency

Actian empowers data engineers and architects to “shift left”—identifying issues early in the pipeline and automating tedious tasks like validation, reconciliation, and monitoring. This significantly frees up technical teams to focus on value-added activities, from schema evolution to data product development.

4. Scale Confidently With Architectural Freedom

Built for modern, composable data stacks, Actian Data Observability integrates seamlessly with cloud data warehouses, lakehouses, and open table formats. Its decoupled architecture scales effortlessly—handling thousands of data quality  checks in parallel without performance degradation. With native Apache Iceberg support, it’s purpose-built for next-gen data platforms.

Actian Data Observability: What Sets it Apart

Actian Data Observability stands apart from its competitors in several critical dimensions. Most notably, Actian is the only platform that guarantees 100% data coverage without sampling, whereas tools from other vendors often rely on partial or sampled datasets, increasing the risk of undetected data issues. Additional vendors, while offering tools strong in governance, do not focus on observability and lacks this capability entirely.

In terms of cost control, Actian Data Observability uniquely offers a “no cloud cost surge” guarantee. Its architecture ensures compute efficiency and predictable cloud billing, unlike some vendors which can trigger high scan fees and unpredictable cost overruns. Smaller vendors’ pricing models are still maturing and may not be transparent at scale.

Security and governance are also core strengths for Actian. Its secured zero-copy architecture enables checks to run in-place—eliminating the need for risky or costly data movement. In contrast, other vendors typically require data duplication or ingestion into their own environments. Others offer partial support here, but often with tradeoffs in performance or integration complexity.

When it comes to scaling AI/ML workloads for observability, Actian’s models are designed for high-efficiency enterprise use, requiring less infrastructure and tuning. Some other models, while powerful, can be compute-intensive. Others offer moderate scalability, and have limited native ML support in this context.

A standout differentiator is Actian’s native support for Apache Iceberg—a first among observability platforms. While others are beginning to explore Iceberg compatibility, Actian’s deep, optimized integration provides immediate value for organizations adopting or standardizing on Iceberg. Many other vendors currently offer no meaningful support here.

Finally, Actian Data Observability’s decoupled data quality engine enables checks to scale independently of production pipelines—preserving performance while ensuring robust coverage. This is a clear edge over some other solutions, who tightly couple checks with pipeline workflows.

Why Modern Observability Capabilities Matter

Most observability tools were built for a different era—before Iceberg, before multi-cloud, and before ML-heavy data environments. As the stakes rise, the bar for observability must rise too.

Actian meets that bar. And then exceeds it.

With full data coverage, native modern format support, and intelligent scaling—all while minimizing risk and cost—Actian Data Observability is not just a tool. It’s the foundation for data trust at scale.

Final Thoughts

If you’re evaluating data observability tools and need:

  • Enterprise-grade scalability.
  • Modern format compatibility (Iceberg, Parquet, Delta).
  • ML-driven insights without resource drag.
  • Secure, in-place checks.
  • Budget-predictable deployment.

Then Actian Data Observability deserves a serious look.

Learn more about how we can help you build trusted data pipelines—at scale, with confidence.

The post Beyond Visibility: How Actian Data Observability Redefines the Standard appeared first on Actian.


Read More
Author: Phil Ostroff

DGIQ + AIGov Conference: Takeaways and Trending Topics in Data Quality


In this series of blog posts, I aim to share some key takeaways from the DGIQ + AIGov Conference 2024 held by DATAVERSITY. These takeaways include my overall professional impressions and a high-level review of the most prominent topics discussed in the conference’s core subject areas: data governance, data quality, and AI governance.  In the first blog post of […]

The post DGIQ + AIGov Conference: Takeaways and Trending Topics in Data Quality appeared first on DATAVERSITY.


Read More
Author: Irina Steenbeck

Unlocking AI Success: Creating a Winning Data Strategy


AI has the power to transform industries by analyzing massive datasets and automating complex processes. However, AI’s effectiveness is directly tied to the integrity of the data fueling it. Data governance is required to drive accountability around privacy and ethics, while poor quality data results in inaccurate AI outcomes, leading to customer dissatisfaction, delayed decisions, […]

The post Unlocking AI Success: Creating a Winning Data Strategy appeared first on DATAVERSITY.


Read More
Author: Cameron Ogden

Beyond Paper Policies: Building a Living Data Policy Framework
Data policies serve as the guardrails for how organizations manage their most valuable asset: data. Just as communities establish guidelines for shared community spaces, data policies provide the framework for how teams access, utilize, and govern their collective and shared data resources.  These policies aren’t merely bureaucratic exercises. They establish the rules of engagement for […]


Read More
Author: Subasini Periyakaruppan

Data Is Risky Business: Is Data Governance Failing? Or Are We Failing Data Governance?
In January, CDO Magazine carried an article by a consortium of authors including Dr. Tom Redman, John Ladley, Dr. Anne-Marie Smith, and others. The eye-catching headline: “Data Governance is failing — here’s why.” The article sets out the results of a Force Field Analysis study carried out by the authors to try and understand why, […]


Read More
Author: Daragh O Brien

Living the Ungoverned Life
Organizations often assume they have data governance under control, but in reality, many are simply reacting to data chaos rather than actively managing it. This isn’t due to negligence or a lack of concern — rather, it’s because they don’t recognize that governance is already happening, albeit informally and inconsistently. Every day, employees make critical […]


Read More
Author: Robert S. Seiner

The Serviceberry Mindset: How Nature’s Gift Economy Can Reshape Data Governance
The Death of the Data Silo Is Not the End of the Problem For years, we’ve heard that breaking down data silos is the holy grail of business transformation. We’ve been told that better pipelines, integrated analytics, and AI-driven decision-making will finally unlock the full potential of enterprise data. But here’s the question no one […]


Read More
Author: Christine Haskell

Reimagining Data Preparation for High-Impact Decision-Making
Data often arrives from multiple sources in inconsistent forms, including duplicate entries from CRM systems, incomplete spreadsheet records, and mismatched naming conventions across databases. These issues slow analysis pipelines and demand time-consuming cleanup. Organizations now use machine learning-assisted data preparation to address these challenges, which automatically standardizes formats, detects anomalies, and applies business rules.  Data […]


Read More
Author: Ainsley Lawrence

The Art of Lean Governance: Moving Beyond Governance Buzzwords and Bling
This column will expand on a Systems Thinking approach to Data Governance and focus on process control. The vendors of myriad governance tools focus on metadata, dictionaries, and quality metrics. Their marketing is a sea of buzzwords and bling — bells and whistles. Yet, where is the evidence of adding actual business value, defined as […]


Read More
Author: Steve Zagoudis

Empowering Data Stewards: Building a Forum That Drives Value
Data steward forums are catalysts for organizational data wisdom and cultural transformation. When executed thoughtfully, they become your strongest asset in building a data-driven organization. However, their success hangs delicately on implementation — the difference between fostering lasting engagement and watching enthusiasm fade lies in the fundamental framework you establish from day one.  1. Building […]


Read More
Author: Subasini Periyakaruppan

The State of Data Governance
In 2024, our research at Dresner Advisory Services revealed that only 32% of organizations have a formal data governance organization in place. This statistic highlights a critical gap, especially as machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly integrated into operations, expanding business reliance on data and analytic content. Despite the growing importance of […]


Read More
Author: Myles Suer

RSS
YouTube
LinkedIn
Share