Designing for Data Democratization

Within any data-driven organization lives a complex ecosystem where cross-departmental teams with different experience and knowledge levels work together to drive innovation, solve problems, and discover new insights using internal and external data. That being said, there are still barriers and isolated workflows that slow down teams from experiencing a seamless collaborative experience. In order to break down data and business silos, the first step is to democratize data.

Data democratization lays the pathways for people to find, understand, and use data within their organization to make data-driven decisions. A data catalog is a popular solution for democratizing data, as it allows organizations to centralize their data so that they can easily find, manage, and monitor data assets from one single point of access while adhering to governance rules to uphold data privacy, usage, and residency requirements.

In order to democratize data effectively, a data catalog solution needs to be designed with accessibility and inclusion in mind—inclusivity is about removing all barriers, both social and technological. A data catalog can't be only usable by data scientists, and must appeal to a spectrum of data literacy.


By listening to the needs of our users and the data community, we consistently make usability enhancements to the ThinkData Works Catalog Platform. We’re excited to introduce some new features and design improvements to make the data governance and discovery journey more inclusive for everyone who uses ThinkData Works!

Discovery Improvements

Catalog Updates

✓  Visibility into data completeness for an effortless discovery experience with a quick view of metadata, data health, and activity

✓  Tailored catalog experience to reduce cognitive load with a card design that simplifies data information

Advanced Search  

✓ Improve productivity with Elasticsearch so that users can spend less time sifting through data, and search on metadata elements, keywords, columns, and administrative metadata (e.g. updates, shares, topics, etc.)

✓ Build trust by strengthening user’s confidence in the data discovery process – search results don’t just show matches, they show how the dataset matches a search query

Governance Improvements

Triage Updates

✓ Bulk actions can now be applied during the data curation process so that data producers can improve their productivity by being able to bulk classify, reimport, and share multiple datasets at once

✓ Advanced search allows users to apply multiple search criteria for an easier governance and discovery experience that helps data stewards find exactly what they’re looking for

✓ Monitor organization uploads and shared data to keep a line of sight into all data flowing into the catalog

✓ Edit popover panel helps users make quick adjustments while seeing their data and staying in context, simplifying and streamlining data management.

New Governance Features

Metadata Templates   

Power users of the platform can now create metadata templates to use across the organization, bolstering standard and sophisticated metadata management for improved business processes.

Data Virtualization  

Instantly connect to data that resides outside of the catalog by discovering data in any warehouse with data virtualization.