Reference Data Accelerator

‘A nearly perfect Reference Data Management solution’Data Analyst at a large global bank.

Optimize business processes and integration

Reference data is data that classifies other data. It is used to direct business rules and processes and shapes business people’s daily operational activities. Reference data has key strategic business value, and needs to be governed as such. A controlled approach to handling flat code sets, hierarchical reference data and mappings between variations, avoids broken business processes and costly integration challenges.

Use-Cases

Reference Data Management

A first characteristic of reference data is that it will be ubiquitous throughout your operational environment (i.e. your databases, applications, ETL, scripts, ...). For example, your database records will contain columns like "CUST_TYPE", in which you will find a limited set of values like "GLD_CUST" and "SLV_CUST". Their purpose is to classify data so that you can treat your Silver Customers well and Gold Customers even better. The business rules and processes differ for both, and business people need to act accordingly. Reference data has key strategic business value, and needs to be governed as such.

A second characteristic of reference data is that a lot of it will be outside of your control. ISO Country Codes (ISO 3166-2 and 3166-2) are one of the easiest examples of this. The International Standards Organization (ISO) manages the list of countries. These are found all over your data: which customers are in which countries, operating locations, trials, transactions between countries, ... And yet you do not control that standardized list in any manner. You get what is given and you can only control the way you handle it internally.

A third characteristic of reference data is that there are many types of reference data, and that you definitely need to treat them differently: the way you update to the latest batch of ISO Country Codes (i.e., maybe once a year) will be significantly different from the way you handle internally created product codes (e.g., monthly, with comprehensive review and approval workflows between various stakeholders).

Collibra's Reference Data Accelerator leverages the functions of the Data Governance Center and builds on top of the Business Semantics Glossary to provide a targeted, efficient and business friendly solution for reference data management.

Features

Flat and hierarchical reference data

Reference data comes in the form of straightforward code lists (e.g., ISO Country Codes), more structured, relations form (e.g., ISO Country Codes and their place in Sales regions) as well as in hierarchical form (e.g., product codes). Collibra's Reference Data Accelerator handles all types of reference data equally efficient, making it easily accessible and manageable in a consistent user interface. Adding new types of reference data, different relations or updated hierarchical representations is done in just minutes through the web interface.

Ownership & responsibilities

Large organizations can build up a large amount of reference data domains (or code tables). Imagine just trying to establish the ownership of 1500 code tables in a spreadsheet. Collibra's Reference Data Accelerator makes it easy to identify and manage the ownership of reference data domains through responsibility matrices, including escalation of ownership. Next to domain level ownership, you can also easily configure and manage code-specific responsibilities (e.g., different stewards for different countries, products, regions ...).

Mapping

Reference data is contained in your systems and because you will always have legacy systems and packaged applications which cannot be changed easily, you will always need a capability to map reference data. Whether you need these mappings for an operational purpose (e.g., a flat file used in ETL), for lookup purposes (e.g., people that need to "translate" the code to their own roll ups) or whether you need simple one to one mappings or many to many, Collibra's Reference Data Accelerator makes mapping as easy as editing a spreadsheet with the additional benefit of providing structure and control.

Workflow

There are many different kinds of reference data and you want to treat them differently. Different types of reference data require different governance processes. For example: an approval process for country codes will differ greatly from an approval process for product codes. With Collibra's Reference Data Accelerator you can easily set up different types of reference data, and associate different roles & workflows for each type. The workflows are set up and executed as BPMN 2.0, which provides swim lanes, decision points, deadlines and time outs, ... including calls to APIs and web services (e.g., Steward approval is followed by synchronization into an MDM Hub).

Publish

Reference data will always require human consumption: search to look up a specific code or value, its meaning and rules; indexes to get a listing of all available codes, audits, ... Collibra's Search Everywhere function is included in the Reference Data Accelerator for quick, context sensitive searches. On top of this end users can easily access the platform through a friendly business user portal, where people can set up their own views, filters and indexes on the reference data so that it can be published easily to all users in the organization.

Provision

Reference data will always require system consumption: use of reference data in source or target databases, ETL, lookup values, web services, ... Collibra's Reference Data Accelerator provides snapshots that allow an end user to freeze certain subsets of reference data in time (e.g., countries codes July 2011 or product codes excluding inactive ones September 2014, ...). These are easily accessible through a SQL interface as well as through a web services interface (including queries). This way you can provision approved snapshots to systems for operational use.