Many employees fantasize about the day when they can sleep in and let data do their jobs for them. While data-analytics software is getting sharper, humans are nowhere near out of the loop yet. Savvy makers and users of data software are incorporating human elements in new, productive, and even fun ways.

Aaron Kalb (pictured), co-founder of Alation Inc., recently earned a new title. The company named him its first chief data officer. In the past, the company’s size did not warrant a specialized CDO position. Alation’s close interaction with its customers and its growing store of data created the need for a CDO.

“Our goal is to basically learn from all of them and synthesize those leanings, and then push them back out to our network and also apply them internally,” Kalb said.

This loop of learning from Alation to its customers and back provides keen insights into how people interact with data for better and for worse. These insights are enabling Alation and its users to reach a more advanced level of day-to-day data literacy.

Kalb spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed how the human element can make or break enterprise data projects (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Data catalog shows how ‘sausage is made’

To bolster competency, some Alation customers have “gamefied” data cataloging through company-wide competitions. “Docujams” — activities a bit like hackathons but more collaborative — are a fun way to get employees improving their data skills.

“Different departments would compete to document their data more thoroughly for accurate outcomes, and they would get cakes that had ‘metadata’ on them,” Kalb said.

One data scientist using Alation found some employees becoming a bit too trusting in recommendation engines. “And people who years ago might have been completely ignoring it are now just blindly doing whatever it said,” Kalb explained.

The data scientist is now training the employees to research the data in the catalog so they don’t “eat the sausage” if they don’t know how it was made.

Perfecting algorithms to flawlessly instruct humans is an interesting aspiration, Kalb pointed out. But these are garbage-in, garbage-out processes in the end. Data cataloging trains humans to cover computers’ weak spots and keep bad sausage off the company’s plate, he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Alation Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Alation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE