Technical solutions that utilize data lakes solve the data access problem, but leave the crucial understanding of the issues to only a few advanced users and data scientists. This white paper by Saama Technologies discusses a method of defining and using data assets as a foundation block for faster and flexible analytics solutions. The complexity of data supply chains and the technical infrastructures to manage them are growing. Simply mastering the plumbing infrastructure isn’t sufficient to tackle today’s business problems. The hidden signals that are mined when seemingly unrelated data elements are brought together need to be orchestrated so that the business can make intelligent, data-driven decisions. However, understanding signals or correlations across time series data and dimensions is not a simple job. In most organizations, neither IT nor business has the capabilities to search for these needles in the haystack, let alone discover the correlations.