Alation: The Front Door to Data Intelligence at Sallie Mae

Sallie Mae had over 500 data users, 250TB of data and 350,000 database fields needing cataloging, but no formal enterprise-wide data governance program, despite being a regulated bank; Senior Director Elizabeth Friend said governance existed only in scattered pockets of the company. Sallie Mae implemented the Alation Data Intelligence Platform as a central hub integrating cataloging, policy management and collaboration, building a stewardship program, self-service 'Alation articles,' a cross-company steering group, and an Analytics Academy with bi-weekly sessions drawing 100+ attendees, prioritizing critical financial-reporting assets first. Friend said governance went from feeling 'disjointed' before Alation to bringing people together across forums, and the platform became Sallie Mae's primary tool for data discovery and governance, reducing search/discovery time.

Alation is a data-catalog and data-intelligence platform that tells a pharma team what data actually exists, who owns it, and whether it is trustworthy enough to support an AI use case.

This sits in the Design & Stress-Test stage of the AI use-case lifecycle: Named examples from the tools pharma teams use to scope, prototype and benchmark an AI use case before committing to build it — data-catalog, sandbox and evaluation platforms.