What Is Data Intelligence?

What is Data Intelligence?

Data intelligence is the contextual understanding of data enabled by metadata-driven insights into data classes, quality, lineage, ownership, transformation and relationships. Put another way, data intelligence helps you better understand the fundamentals of your data by deriving its meaningful attributes — the who, what, where, when and how.

For example, you may want to know your data’s value for digital transformation initiatives, its reliability as it’s transformed, or its risk impact if exposed and misused. Data intelligence helps enable data-driven decision making that can be deemed reliable, accurate and perhaps most importantly, trustworthy.

Today’s organizations have access to more data sets from more data sources than ever before. With great data comes great responsibility. Having access to something and understanding the best way to use it are two different things. That’s where data intelligence comes in.

Successful data leaders understand that data intelligence represents a significant opportunity to empower your employees to:

• Create enterprise value
• Empower data consumers and drive business outcomes
• Enable inherent trust in the data
• Create opportunities to fully understand the data
• Grow and scale capabilities as business needs evolve

To get the greatest value from your data, you need to understand and fill data intelligence gaps. When you do that, your data analytics can enable actionable insights. And this in turn allows you to create more effective ways to interact with partners and customers.

Why Data Intelligence Matters

It’s often said that data is the new oil. But much like crude oil, data represents potential for value. It’s what data empowers that makes data so valuable.

Data mining and data science are only effective if the data they work with is trustworthy. The same goes for data visualizations. Data is necessary to ensure that data visualizations are more relevant, accurate and qualitative.

Good data management applies data governance best practices. It finds data within silos, then cleanses and organizes it. This helps to ensure it can be used to inform intelligent business decision making. Add artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to further accelerate your data insights. With predictive analytics, you can streamline next-best actions and fuel more informed decisions, faster.

The influx of data flows led to the era of Big Data. Big data analytics emerged as a way to help companies better understand all that data. Data intelligence takes the next step. It allows you to unleash data’s business value with data-driven decision making. It’s not just about faster and more relevant insights — it’s about what you can do with them to drive value.

Data Intelligence Use Cases

Better, more effective business performance goes beyond improving data quality and data insights. It represents a way to use that knowledge to generate value by:

• Improving productivity
• Achieving operational efficiencies
• Enhancing customer experiences and building loyalty

When it comes to understanding customer intent and consumer trends, trustworthy data is key. High-quality, timely data enables reliable AI-powered insights. This allows you to pinpoint the best way to influence buyer behavior. And that can help you optimize the best way to engage with your customers. Understanding what your customers want and when they want it makes it much easier to develop your marketing strategy. You can know:

• Which market segments are your most dedicated, appropriate and profitable
• How customers are purchasing, through which channels and why
• When purchasing preferences are strongest

Understanding buyer behavior helps you meet your customers where they are. It helps you create the kinds of experiences that lead to better engagement, improved wallet share and long-term customer loyalty.

Your customers are aware that companies can access and use their personal data. But if you don’t manage this personal data, it can be a double-edged sword. You build trust and loyalty when you govern and use this data responsibly. Data intelligence allows you to use sensitive data with a greater understanding of what your customers want. Data intelligence allows you to provide a better experience, while avoiding risks of data misuse.

Governing data responsibly also empowers more people in your organization. Treating business-critical data as an asset, rather than a liability, allows you to put appropriate guardrails in place. This encourages productivity and efficiency, while minimizing risk exposure. You also improve data literacy when you change the perception of data. It becomes the fuel that drives innovation, transforms the business and achieves better outcomes.

The ability to democratize data — to share it with more people in your organization — can help your business, too. Trustworthy data builds confidence in data as a high-value asset. And you speed up time to value for the business when you empower more users to make decisions that are more reliable and data driven.

The net result of predictive data intelligence? You increase confidence in your data. Your organization gains a high level of trust in your data assets with:

• Data quality
• Accuracy
• Relevancy
• Confidentiality

Improved confidence in the data increases opportunities to create business value. It also ensures that the organization remains within regulatory compliance by mitigating risk. This allows data stewards to share trustworthy enterprise data throughout your company. And that can lead to improved performance throughout the business via:

• Optimized operations
• Timely insights for finance
• More effective marketing
• Improved sales

And as applications and data move to the cloud, the organization benefits from the ability to:

• Scale data governance
• Accelerate time to value
• Extend your reach to more data consumers
• Simplify how you derive and apply data intelligence

Cloud-based data warehouses and data lakes can give organizations more agility. They are flexible and scalable, so they save money. And the cloud helps you open up more data for analysis — to drive value for your customers. But you can’t realize that value if you can’t offer trustworthy data or reduce exposure to risk. Data governance in the cloud, when hosted on trusted platforms, allows you to enable and accelerate data intelligence to maximize data insights.

Discover more information on data governance.

How to Use Data Intelligence in Your Industry

Healthcare

When you’re working with electronic patient health information (ePHI) such as patient records and payer data, trustworthy and reliable data is essential. You need to comply with mandates such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) and protect healthcare data. But healthcare professionals understand the potential of patient data. And since the insights from patient data can literally save lives, it’s critical to provide responsible access.

With predictive analytics, data scientists can understand potential options. They can develop answers that can help patients take proactive steps with their health. Data intelligence can help doctors identify future health problems and work with their patients to proactively recommend healthy lifestyle choices. Medical professionals can adopt new and successful treatments. And drug companies can prioritize research and development for the next generation of medicines.

Public Sector

Planning for the future is essential when it comes to new schools, hospitals, public safety, public transportation and other community needs. As an example, the quality and reliability of census data will influence how public projects are funded for years to come.

Data intelligence can help convert population growth data with data intelligence about demographics and economic conditions into useful predictions for the public sector. Agencies can then use these predictions to ensure their planning is backed by important metrics.

Manufacturing and Distribution

Data and automation are already making supply chains and manufacturing more efficient. Now, data intelligence can help you see around corners. Democratizing data across teams can drive insights that help supply and demand stay in sync. Data intelligence can help you predict and avoid supply chain issues.

And further downstream, when products reach distributors and retailers, you can even monitor prices in real time and adjust them based on data intelligence about buying behavior patterns. In short, data intelligence can help you build long-term trust and loyalty by delivering better, more appropriate, products and services.

Financial services

Data intelligence can help you increase or preserve customer trust, a key factor when managing money. By better understanding markets, you can improve the quality of financial advice and investment management. You can do that with accurate, qualitative, relevant data.

In the financial services industry, you want data to be an asset when creating new financial products and services — not a liability. Data governance minimizes risk exposure and allows more stakeholders in your organization to use data safely to drive value.

Data Intelligence in Practice: What to Look For in a Data Catalog Solution

To become a digital-first organization, it’s important to focus on how data is captured, curated and presented. In modern data environments, data catalogs are central to the collection and activation of data intelligence.

Intelligence about data is more valuable when your organization can learn and is able to deliver insights at scale. Which is why you should consider all dimensions of intelligence about data when selecting a data intelligence solution.

Data Intelligence Examples: Customer Success Stories

See how Informatica’s solutions accelerate and deliver trustworthy data insights, helping these companies harness data intelligence.

Eli Lilly and Company

To improve its ability to fight disease and help communities, Eli Lilly and Company needed to uncover data dispersed across silos and allow more teams access to business-critical information. Informatica’s data governance and data quality solutions allowed them to comply with healthcare data regulations even as they created new solutions with their data. Lilly also created a collaborative enterprise data marketplace to empower self-service analytics. This gave the company’s data consumers trustworthy data they could use to achieve increased revenue.

Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency

The UK Department of Transport’s Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) wanted to standardize and automate data quality. They also needed to keep data secure and in compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). With the help of Informatica’s data governance and data quality solutions, DVSA improved data-driven decision-making with faster delivery of higher-quality data. They were also able to increase security and efficiency by bringing all driver and vehicle data into a single repository. This allowed them to build greater trust and improve interaction with their citizens.

Data Intelligence Solutions

Make sure your company is prepared for the road ahead. Adopt data intelligence best practices and explore the complete, comprehensive cloud-native and AI-powered data management capabilities offered by the Informatica^® Intelligent Data Management Cloud™ (IDMC). Designed to help businesses efficiently handle the complex challenges of dispersed and fragmented data to truly innovate with their data — on any platform, any cloud, multi-cloud and multi-hybrid — IDMC services can help you create more value for your customers.

• Cloud Data Quality – Data consumers can measure, validate and rely upon data using AI-driven insights. Cloud Data Quality services deliver trusted data for users throughout the enterprise to provide confidence to decisionmakers.
• Cloud Data Governance and Catalog – Understanding what data you have enables you to discover information across your global enterprise. Cloud Data Governance and Catalog services help you fuel your business with metadata-driven intelligence. You save valuable time and free resources by automating manual tasks with AI/ML.
• Cloud Data Marketplace – Learn how democratizing data for everyone can drive value creation and empower data consumers throughout your organization. Discover how Cloud Data Marketplace services can deliver data-fueled insights at enterprise scale to your business and beyond.
• Master Data Management – Discover how intelligent Master Data Management (MDM) services let you connect data across the enterprise for a contextual 360-degree view and insights.

Data Intelligence Resources

If you’re ready to get more value out of your data, learn more about how you can deliver insights that inform better business decisions:

Find the best predictive data intelligence technology for your company with the “IDC Technology Assessment Guide: Activating Data Intelligence to Deliver Business Value.”¹

Learn how you can easily share and access data from across your organization in “Data Sharing Marketplaces for Dummies.”

Explore the business value of data governance with this free workbook.

Check out the blog, Five Reasons Why Modern Data-Driven Organizations Need a Foundation of Predictive Data Intelligence.

Get a copy of The Ultimate Checklist for Cloud Master Data Management.