dataspot.
Chasing Data Excellence with Irrefutable Passion

Knowledge, information, data; regardless of what one chooses to call these related terms, they are units of power. Realising the inherent value of such assets on hand and maintaining the awareness of how to utilise them always ensures the best possible results. The founders of dataspot., an organisation dedicated to empowering and educating businesses to achieve data excellence, wholly trust this notion of wielding knowledge impeccably in the current master data and metadata management (MeDM) landscape to realise the many organisational objectives. Their thorough understanding of data governance has positioned dataspot. as a highly desirable metadata solution and service provider in the European marketplace, enabling companies to truly look at and leverage data as an asset. “We strongly believe that understanding the business comes first. And to be passionate about your business, you must be passionate about data,” expresses Barbara Kainz, Managing Partner at dataspot.

Established in 2016, dataspot. is the brainchild of Barbara and Michaela Mader, who met at IBM, where their passion for data led to an inevitable and formidable collaboration. Barbara maintains an incredibly comprehensive experience in the areas of data modelling and warehousing, while Michaela specialises in business intelligence (BI), analytics, and other data usage capabilities. With this combined, complementary, and expansive expertise, the duo recognised the dire need for an innovative consulting approach—the Data Excellence Framework—and, furthermore, an effective metadata management tool that genuinely helped enterprises best understand and optimise their data through metadata. Consultants at first, they quickly set out to build their own software: dataspot.—designed by founder number three, Alexander Kainz, Barbara’s husband, who possesses over 25 years of experience as a software architect.

The company continues to employ its consulting approach with each of its clients, which is unique, allowing for an easier, more streamlined definition of data governance that ensures each customer grasps the concepts perfectly, bolstering decision-making processes throughout their organisation. Before elaborating on the features of dataspot.’s software, it is worth mentioning that efforts of chasing after excellence in data have earned it 12 KPI top ranks in BARC’s Data Management Survey 22, which is no small feat in the current hyper competitive marketplace.

In the Data Excellence Framework, all aspects of immaculate data management and data governance are touched upon, driven by metadata. The software aligns heavily with a client’s business goals alongside the data responsibilities on an enterprise-wide scale. This makes dataspot. much more than just the average data catalog solution. The company enables users to simply import technical metadata of varying file formats into the software—with the added features of JDBC metadata connectors—in a quick and easy fashion from anywhere in the building. And this metadata comes with a host of details and can be easily enhanced with data lineage to help thoroughly understand the information within a business ecosystem. With its strong business perspective, dataspot. has provisioned a clear business data model that represents information from each department, such as HR, sales, finance, and so forth, within the software to assist the decision-makers. Moreover, real-time APIs to use metadata in any other application or BI landscape, and most importantly, exhaustive KPIs and various report catalogues are expressed as well. Barbara and her team have essentially provided the perfect mediation layer between business and IT, thus effectuating a business model that runs as smoothly as a well-oiled and -maintained engine.

It goes without saying that when data is the topic of conversation, whispers of GDPR are just around the corner. dataspot. has that covered too, and maintains complete mastery over the subject. The Data Excellence platform manages and tags all the information flowing in and out of an organisation. In doing so, the company can support its clients with best-in-class data governance as and when required. “Tagging the relevant data and combining them with business processes in dataspot. provides a record of monitoring activities for GDPR out of the box,” explains Barbara, while the integrated Data Quality catalog drives trustworthy information. The solution is also a cross-tenant platform in addition to its multi-tenant competencies, which allows users to define a set of models as the base tenants and add several subtenants by sharing the same base model. “Our clients were strongly requesting us for such a feature, and we delivered. No one else offers such capabilities on the market, we are literally the only ones!,” states Barbara.

To further elucidate on dataspot.’s MDM capabilities, the co-founder shares the story of how her company assisted the City of Vienna, one of their first and major clients. The idea of supporting a public organisation that has over 100 departments and 60,000 plus employees may seem daunting to most but not to the passionate in the pursuit of perfection. The client was facing issues with their data warehouse project at the time, which performed adequately for one single use case but was not entirely satisfactory in terms of all-around capabilities and quality of data. “We approached them and made them understand that the providing of data and the usage of data cannot be limited to a technical platform,” recalls Barbara. She also adds that this problem is not dissimilar to the issues faced by many companies even today.

With a limited budget, and an even smaller timeframe, dataspot. was required to first establish a data governance mindset with a business data model. After which, the main challenge of setting up a new data warehouse for four big streams—finance, HR, organisation, and address—was presented. Barbara and her team successfully educated the client on true data governance and deployed their solution across many departments within the stipulations, with no compromise on quality. “At the final steering of the project, the CIO of the City of Vienna said that, in her experience, it is not the big companies that make a difference. It is the smaller ones with passion,” says a proud Barbara.

With such a strong drive towards helping the world achieve data excellence, dataspot. stands a cut above the rest with its absolute determination and resolve. Moving forward, the company intends to spread more awareness and educate professionals on the competence required to be masters of data. It hosts a comprehensive, 10-session bootcamp—with homework, of course—to truly inculcate the passion for data excellence from within. Spreading further out into the world, with partners in Switzerland and Germany, dataspot. is the go-to enterprise if one wishes to boast complete mastery of their data with a highly professional but user- friendly tool.