What is an Analytics Catalog?

An Analytics Catalog is a critical component of a BI Portal Solution that consolidates all enterprise reporting and analytics assets into a single reporting metadata data catalog. It provides users with a single self-service data interface that can access all reporting and dashboards irrespective of the underlying BI Tool Technology. The Metadata for each report can be extended by adding information such as tagging, and certification. Governance capabilities are enabled through comprehensive usage tracking across all reporting in the enterprise.

Metric Insights' Enterprise BI Portal
Metric Insights’ Enterprise BI Portal

Why do you need an Analytics Catalog?

An Analytics Catalog is an important tool to improve governance, usability and engagement for Business Intelligence. It acts as the enterprise data catalog for your business users and provides the following critical capabilities:

Why is an Analytics Catalog only part of a BI Portal Solution?

Although a Catalog is an essential part of any Business Intelligence Portal, it is not by itself sufficient to significantly enhance user adoption of analytics. This is because engaging business users who typically only spend a few minutes a day on analytics requires drawing their attention to the reports that require immediate action.

To realize the full transformational benefits of a BI Portal solution, the following additional BI Portal capabilities must be deployed alongside the Analytics Catalog:

How does an Analytics Catalog help with BI Tool governance?

An Analytics Catalog tracks every access of a user to a visualization in its internal data catalog. This information can be used by the Business Intelligence team to provide the BI Tool Governance that achieves the following benefits:

Tableau Sales Analysis Dashboard within Metric Insights
Tableau Sales Analysis Dashboard within Metric Insights

What are the most important features of an Analytics Catalog?

The following features are essential when building or purchasing an Analytics Catalog as part of an Enterprise-scale deployment of a BI Portal:

Do Analytics Catalogs by themselves increase User engagement?

Analytics Catalogs provide business users with a single source of truth for accessing reporting. However, by themselves they are insufficient to significantly increase user engagement. This is due to the following limitations:

In order to boost user engagement, an Analytics Catalog must be extended with mash-ups, KPI alerting, and distribution capabilities so that each business user has an engaging experience.

Metric Insights Mobile App
Metric Insights Mobile App

What are best practices for building an Analytics Catalog?

To implement an Analytics Catalog at enterprise scale, the following process is recommended:

To learn more about how an Analytics Catalog works as an integral part of an BI Portal, see our webinars.

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