SalesTechStar Interview with Matthew Monahan, Director of Product Management at Zaloni

Automation systems have to be configured in a way so as to ensure better data governance; Matthew Monahan, Director of Product Management at Zaloni shares a few top tips:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Matthew, tell us about your journey through the tech market and more about your role at Zaloni.

My name is Matthew Monahan, and I am the Director of Product Management here at Zaloni. I have been with Zaloni for 3 years, but I have been working in the software industry for more than 20 years, half of that in product management and specializing in DataOps for the last 7 years. With Zaloni, I drive the strategic direction of the data governance and catalog product offerings. It is also a part of my mission to leverage the latest technologies and techniques for effectively managing data pipelines to better serve our customers. For me, it’s been a thrilling roller coaster to experience the different technology changes over the past years as organizations rapidly evolve how they manage and consume their data.

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We’d love to hear more about Zaloni’s data cataloging updates and how that’s enabling better data governance and data management processes for DataOps teams?

In my own words, a great data catalog enables data citizens to quickly find the data they need and provision it in a self-service manner. This catalog is the hub for everything else that a DataOps team manages. Zaloni’s data platform, Arena, provides both the data governance and data catalog capabilities to provide a single pane of glass from which a DataOps team can orchestrate their user’s access to data. Lastly, with the addition of automated data classification to the platform, Zaloni is taking another step toward fully automated data governance. 

What does it take to build stronger data management processes across the organizational hierarchy, not just in DevOps?

Automation is the holy grail of data governance. A system that a data steward can configure to enforce data governance policies throughout the DataOps lifecycle reduces human intervention and human error while accelerating access to the data needed for critical business decisions. Today, many data management tools, including the Zaloni Arena platform, reduce the human workload by leveraging workflows and orchestration for repetitive tasks. On the other hand, true automation eliminates the creation of those workflows based on AI and ML techniques to gain a deeper understanding of an organization’s data and apply the proper policies. Ultimately, this automation enables participants across the organization to adopt DataOps best practices within their teams. 

How would you advise functional heads and business leaders to come together to enable this?

As with any cross-functional endeavor, communication and teamwork are key. To be on the same team, these collaborators need to define their shared vision for using and managing data within the organization. They should take a use case-driven approach to data monetization while still protecting data as a core corporate asset. In fact, one of the emerging roles of the chief data officer is to ensure the ongoing value of data akin to a chief financial officer’s responsibility to protect cash assets. Once the ground rules are established for protecting the data and the use cases have been identified for monetizing the data, it is easier for these cross-functional teams to align on these key objectives.

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How does Zaloni’s new partnership with CData help the end-user more?

Zaloni is excited about its recent partnership announcement with CData. The partnership with CData enables our customers to connect the Zaloni Arena catalog to an enormous list of data sources. CData connectors enable Arena to connect to these sources without custom development work.  It’s important to note that a data catalog is only useful to the extent of the data it includes. At Zaloni, we want to empower our customers to utilize their data to the fullest extent and encourage them to shift towards data-driven decision-making.

Some last thoughts, takeaways, predictions on data observability practices set to evolve in B2B?

In my opinion, auto-govern and the enforcement of policies displayed in a dashboard format will be the new standard for data observability. If you look at any modern financial application, the most substantial aspect is the visualizations. Dashboards, reports and charts are all designed to put the right information at your fingertips to make smart financial investments. Additionally, data observability is how chief data officers will assess and track the value and the risks present in their organization’s data. 

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