A deeper understanding of data usability

The first motivation for implementing data governance is that data should be usable. I think the statement alone is already very clear: we build a data platform so that it can be useful. But if we think more about it, how can data be usable by the end users?

The following are the two aspects that we should think about to improve data usability:

• Users should know how to find the data
• Users should easily understand the data

Let’s discuss the first aspect, that is, the users should know how to find the data.

A data engineering team and the data governance team will be successful if only the data that they produce is used by the end users. It’s nearly impossible to achieve this goal if the end users find it difficult to retrieve the data to get the information that they need.

You may think that it does not make sense that the end users can’t find the data. Unfortunately, this is one of the most common...