IE School of Human Sciences and Technology (HST) and Anjana Data have started a collaboration to promote educational activities that encourage technological innovation and content related to Data Governance.

Aware of the growing need for organizations to receive executive-level training, IE School of Human Sciences and Technology (HST) offers a learning ecosystem that trains professionals with the objective of preparing them to make positive changes in their organizations. For this reason, IE HST and Anjana Data, the Data Governance solution for the Big Data and Multi-Cloud era, have joined to teach practical training content that includes real experiences and use cases of Data Governance.

IE School of Human Sciences and Technology is committed to an innovative and differential solution to provide added value to its students, while Anjana Data is sharing their disruptive vision of data governance to strengthen data strategies within organizations.

Their first action will be the participation of Anjana Data as a Technology Partner in the Programs offered by HST, one of them is the “EXECUTIVE MASTER IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION & INNOVATION LEADERSHIP” with an educational license from Anjana Data (SaaS mode) through a series of interactive use cases.

In this educational offering, Ana Melcón Sanjuán (Head of Product & Software Development) and Mario de Francisco Ruiz (CEO), both members of the Anjana Data team, will participate by presenting the Data Governance solution to the students and proposing a series of practical cases to be developed to bring students closer to real world applications.

The proposal of contents and resources on Data Governance created by IE School of Human Sciences and Technology and Anjana Data will include:

• The joint organization of the webinar “Turning DATA into a strategic asset: The “collaborative metadata-centric approach for Data Governance implementation” with Mario de Francisco Ruiz as speaker.
• The preparation of a series of joint events and webinars on data management and data governance.
• The extension of case studies and educational licenses for interactive cases to other HST Programs.
• Participation of Ana Melcón Sanjuán and Mario de Francisco Ruiz in masterclasses within different HST Programs.

The year 2020 has brought for Anjana Data an evolution in terms of its functionalities and features, both technical and usability, which provide a differential value in the final objective of achieving an effective and efficient Data Governance, necessary to turn data into a strategic asset of any organization.

Following the same vision and philosophy of the collaborative approach focused on metadata, we have worked in four main ways:

• Facilitating the consumption of information by the different participants and extending the interaction capacities between them with improved usability
• To make the CORE metamodel more flexible so that it can be adapted to the needs of the organization, offering new extension and adaptation capabilities.
• Expand the configuration and maintenance capabilities of the governance model
• Technology integration with different platforms to offer end-2-end automation and increased interoperability capabilities through APIs.

Below we detail the new capabilities improvements that Anjana Data’s version 2.0 offers:

UX and UI improvements

With the premise of delivering a version that is easy to use and fulfills the function of being the central solution for data governance in an organization, Anjana Data presents improvements in the user experience and interface through substantial changes in different screens of the application such as the Data Portal, the detail views of the objects, the lineage graphs, the management of the workflows and the Administration Panel.

The Data Portal includes a more advanced and optimized search engine, dynamic filters, new more intuitive icons and more condensed information to facilitate the search and discovery of governed data assets. In addition, the solution now allows to visualize the properties of the objects with different views to adapt to the user’s consumption needs and also simplifies the process of massive loading of objects both from Excel and by automatic import making use of the available connectors or the API.

In relation to the lineage and traceability graphs, new elements are included to facilitate their interpretation, such as the representation of the users adhering to DSAs, directional arrows that indicate the direction of the data flow (datasets input >> process/instance >> datasets output) and the differentiation of related process instances with respect to the own ones for the solutions.

As for the visualization of workflows, new ways of consuming the information are also available in order to have a global vision of the requests, facilitating their follow-up and offering the possibility of having all the detail available at the click of a button.

Finally, to facilitate the configuration and administration of the solution, a new front panel is presented from which all the parameterization, management and maintenance tasks of the government model can be carried out graphically (business areas, roles, users, permissions, workflows, taxonomies, passive vs. active government, connections, parameter catalogues, tags, …).

Capabilities improvements: CORE 2.0 Metamodel

In the new version, Anjana Data’s CORE Metamodel has not only been extended with additional metadata but also offers now the possibility to modify the templates for the different objects. This allows the centralization of taxonomy management and the inclusion of new metadata over time, according to the needs of the organization.

In addition, users will be able to add specific metadata to individual objects according to their permission settings and will be able to have predefined data type catalogues for some fields based on supported technologies and formats.

Active government and dynamic lineage agnostic to technology and on new platforms natively

Being the only data governance solution that offers active government and dynamic lineage agnostic to data storage and processing technologies is not easy and, therefore, this new version of Anjana Data brings with it a new simplified architecture, specifically designed to facilitate interaction with any technology through the use of services and offering in-memory computing capabilities with unlimited horizontal scalability (yes, unlimited, Big Data style).

Similarly, to allow full interoperability and ensure quick and easy integration into any technology scenario, Anjana Data has a new optimized public API layer that is fully documented. This layer has been extended with new features to offer all the capabilities of Anjana Data to the outside world both inbound and outbound.

In addition, work has continued on native integration with different vendors and technologies such as the entire Cloudera stack (CDH and CDP), any stand-alone Hadoop cluster that uses technologies such as Sentry, HDFS, Impala, Hive, Spark 2.x, … and support for all technologies that comply with the JDBC standard (mostly relational databases, both On-Premise and Cloud).

In this way, it has been possible to evolve a solution that offers the different roles involved, a better work dynamic and optimal management of metadata that facilitates the extraction of value to the business and decision making.

The future of Anjana Data

This new version offers our customers capabilities improvements and a significant leap in quality but, of course, we are already developing the next version which will be launched in April this year. What can we find in this next version?

• New native integration capabilities with different platforms and technologies, which we will be announcing as we close the corresponding partnership agreements that we are managing.
• The new jewel in the crown, a state-of-the-art Business Glossary module, totally flexible and configurable to adapt to the semantic vision of any organization, but 100% connected to our central metamodel, offering the possibility of a complete data journey both top-down and bottom-up.
• Advanced dynamic forms for managing templates and object composition
  Redesign of some interfaces and inclusion of UX and UI improvements with the aim of making Anjana Data’s web application increasingly simple and intuitive and favouring the interaction of different types of roles and users.
• And, the icing on the cake, assistance capabilities for some functionalities, thanks to the analysis of user behaviour and the inclusion of advanced analytics algorithms in the background. That which everyone likes to call “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning”.