Business Glossary

The business glossary, a key feature of PowerCenter Advanced Edition, enables data analysts, business analysts, and data stewards to work together to create, manage, and share a common vocabulary data integration business terms.

This feature fosters cross-functional alignment and helps all parts of the business better understand the context and usage of data. Your IT organization can answer the most common questions that business consumers have about data, such as “What does this data mean?”, “Where does the data come from?”, and “Who has responsibility for this data?”

By providing business context to technical artifacts related to data integration, the business glossary makes it possible to catalog, govern, and use data consistently and efficiently. This feature helps you establish data ownership and manage accountability through auditable data trails that are critical for successful data governance programs and governance, risk, and compliance initiatives.

Features

Common Vocabulary of Business Terms

• Create, manage, and share a common vocabulary of business terms and definitions
• Organize business terms in categories that are relevant to your organization
• Search and explore multiple glossaries of vocabulary and relationships
• Manage valid values definitions and business rules so that they can be easily reused in data integration projects

End-to-End Data Lineage

• Track data’s ultimate sources and any intermediate data store and transformation processes that it flows through
• Visualize data flows and dependencies linked to business terms
• Ensure transparency, responsibility for, and accountability of data
• Audit the usage of business terms in business intelligence reports

Business-Friendly User Interface

• Enable business analysts to explore business terms and identify related terms
• Allow data stewards to comment and request changes

Simple and Secure Deployment

• Use PowerCenter’s unified administrative console to centrally configure and monitor metadata services and manage business glossary users, groups, and roles
• Minimize the risk of unauthorized access to information assets by assigning global teams granular privileges and permissions to objects within the glossary

Benefits

• Foster cross-functional collaboration by establishing clear and consistent data definitions that both the business and IT can understand and use
• Enhance productivity and accelerate project delivery by finding relevant data and metadata, determining the impact of potential changes, and easily reusing data assets
• Address new business requirements quickly by extending the business glossary with custom attributes, new classes, and object models
• Manage comprehensive data governance programs by enabling data stewards to define and own business metadata and the rules that govern data usage
• Execute effective governance, risk, and compliance programs with reliable, auditable data trails showing data stewards the content, origin, and context of data being consumed by the business
• Increase confidence in the data with a comprehensive lineage of data assets and their relationships that shows how business information is derived