Fast Track Your Data with Information Governance Catalog

"Fast track your data is about how do you actually take advantage of data that you have assembled over years and start to put into actions." - Rob Thomas, GM of IBM Analytics

Rob and his senior leadership team in IBM Analytics division are meeting thousands of customers in a live event in Munich tonight to highlight our commitment and innovations in the area of Open source, Unified Governance, Visualization and Hybrid Data Management. This event is very special to me and my team, as we are launching a self serve data governance solution for data scientists and data stewards in this event. A productive data science organization is essential to a successful enterprise and it requires the best of breed data management and information governance. Information governance practices provide a holistic approach to managing, improving and using information to help you gain insight and build confidence in business decisions. The goal is to:

• Bring together data from diverse sources for diverse targets, manage its quality and maintain it throughout its lifecycle
• Protect data and maintain privacy requirements
• Facilitate information-based collaboration across business and technical teams

These broad capabilities help organizations increase the value of data for information-intensive projects including big data and analytics, application consolidation and retirement, security and compliance, master data management and many more.

Data management and governance program spans several roles and personas across organization:

Data Steward: Data is fuel to your business processes and Data Steward recognizes this very well. They maintain production systems auditing requirements and security restrictions. They must be empowered by the tool and not overwhelmed.

Data Scientist: Can be Business analyst, Chief Data Officer but essentially, they are Data consumers. They need relevant data fast yet legally compliant to perform their jobs.  

Compliance Officer: They follow data regulations and ensure proper access of data within the company. They also need to ensure data retention and auditing guidelines. Compliance officers work closely with the Data Steward on enhancing the organization’s ability to protect data.

A Data First Enterprise:

Digital information within a company is exploding. A business must allow its people to find and analyze information faster to make well-founded business decision. IBM Information Governance Catalog (IGC) provides an entry point for an organization to understand and govern its information. With IGC, a Data Steward can create glossary assets: terms, categories, information governance policies, and information governance rules. In addition, they can define relationships between the glossary assets that they create and other catalog assets. These catalog assets may include data resources such as database tables and columns, ETL jobs, profiling processes routines and functions. These assets may come from IBM Information server products and stored in the metadata repository.

With the launch of Information Governance Catalog Trial offering today at "Fast Track Your Data 2017" live event at Munich Germany, IBM is empowering business users to experience the critical yet complicated data management and governance life cycle with few mouse clicks on their laptop.

Trusting your Information with IBM Information Governance Catalog:

All three personas (Data Steward, Data Scientist and Compliance Officer) play a critical role in setting up enterprise data governance strategy. If you are one of them, you would like to get your hands on to the features and capabilities of the solution quickly before you make purchase decision. With IGC Trial, you can start this experience right away. Please visit IBM Marketplace to download a full function Information Governance product on your laptop and follow the guided tutorial that is integrated into the product. We have made the download and productive use experience seamless on Mac and Windows laptops. With the guided tutorial you will be able to experience the use of Business Glossary as a common language across organization and visualization of lineage of data for trust and compliance.

Making sense of data in your organization:

Business metadata includes business terms and their definitions, examples of usage, business rules policies and constraints. Together, they define the semantics of a business concept and its realization in physical data assets. Business users take advantage of business metadata, but anyone can use it to understand what things mean. Examples include learning how, when and by whom a data asset is used, and which policies, rules and restrictions might apply to its use. Consider a scenario where a Business executive gets a quarterly product transaction report and he has questions like these:

• A product transaction report shows loss, but what does it mean?
• Where does the data for calculating the loss come from?
• Were there any returns that contributed to loss?
• Who (which data steward) owns this term?
• What are the business rules that are applied to calculating loss?
• What other reports show profit?

The first step in understanding data is building a business glossary. A common, shared business vocabulary is at the heart of information governance and the metadata management practices deployed by an organization. It is a vehicle of communication that brings business and IT into complete agreement.

Figure: Business glossaries and data lineage tracking enables users to quickly answer questions about the meaning and source of information

With IGC Trial, we provide a guided tour to help you explore business glossary and its use. The ability to retrieve information about data; its source, meaning and usage; and how it was processed promotes trust in the data. 

Building confidence with the metadata:

Technical metadata provides description of data assets including:

• schema, tables and file layouts
• Source and target data store identification and physical attributes
• Data mappings
• Formal specifications of transformation jobs, business rules and other processes

In addition, operational metadata consists of information about the execution of an application or a job. Such information includes times and dates, counts of records processed and rejected, and statistics about processes, processors and servers that are generated in the course of executing a job. A good metadata management strategy provides the tools, processes and environment to enable an organization to answer the question, “How do we know what we know about our data?” This helps organizations make better business decisions because they know they can trust what they see.

With Information Governance Catalog, your organization can build and maintain a strong data governance and stewardship program that turns data into trusted information. You can leverage this trusted information in various information integration and governance projects, including big data integration, master data management (MDM), lifecycle management, and security and privacy initiatives. Give us your 15 minutes and download IGC Trial today and let us know, how IBM can help your organization start trusting your data for making smarter business decisions.