Introduction

Data Catalog and Governance is a new licensed module for Aperture Data Studio that unlocks the ability to catalog your data estate, create a common understanding of terms, drive ownership and accountability and continuously monitor data quality impact.

This module empowers you to drive data literacy, govern data usage, evidence compliance with regulatory standards and achieve trust in your data assets.

Key features

• Data Dictionary – Leverage Aperture Data Studio’s drivers to connect directly to source systems and populate a dictionary with technical metadata that describes the physical data housed there. Once registered with the Catalog:
  • Data can be explicitly profiled using Aperture Data Studio’s engine to describe the structural integrity of the data housed within each table and column with the results of this activity captured in the Catalog for all to see.
  • Aperture Data Studio datasets can be created to facilitate easy exploration within the workflow designer, for users with suitable permissions.
• Business Glossary – Capture common definitions and context relating to your data assets within a single location and map these to entries in the data dictionary to help drive greater data literacy within your organization.
• Capture Tacit Knowledge – with a fully flexible metadata model, you can represent any tacit knowledge you require within the system including:
  • Registering analytics models and what data is fueling them.
  • Documenting all data policies and the data it concerns.
  • Mapping critical data elements to business processes.
  • Centrally capturing Records of Processing Activities (RoPAs), Legitimate Impact Assessments (LIAs), Data Transfer Agreements and other forms relating to the data in a central register.
• Search and Discovery – Enable all users to browse metadata housed within the catalog, search across the full system and ultimately find the answers for all questions relating to the data estate:
  • What does this term mean?
  • Who is responsible for this data?
  • How do I request access to this report?
  • What CDEs impact this business process?
  • Which systems house PII data?
• Conformance monitoring – Ensures data adheres to predefined rules and standards, maintaining quality and usability across systems. Choose what is important to capture (for example, systems have owners, stewards are assigned per data domain, risk levels are mapped for each data asset etc.) and use this information to drive custom scoring of conformance at both record level and in top-down progress dashboards.
• Change management – Audit and approval functionality that allows you to control changes in line with business needs. Every edit in the Data Catalog is audited, with the options to trigger approvals where necessary to prevent automatic updates to all users. Full visibility and an audit trail are promoted as audits of changes are recorded and available for review.
• Collaboration and Engagement – Roles can be explicitly assigned within the catalog to drive accountability and transparency (for example, over who is a data owner vs steward). All users can subscribe to items within the catalog to register their interest and drive personalization in the user interface and can use comments to bring discussions to the catalog.

Flexibility to adapt to your unique needs

This new module is underpinned by a flexible metadata model that can be configured to your specific needs and adapted to reflect your organizational structures:

• Manage what data is captured within the catalog (and the fields for each type of object) to precisely define the metadata needed to be captured.
• Apply agile mapping to tailor the model links to your business needs. Relationships and references help you understand how objects are connected within the system, providing a comprehensive view of data relations and issues.
• Define interest types to categorize and manage data more effectively, ensuring that stakeholders can easily find and access the data.
• Subscribe to specific data assets or interest types, to keep yourself up to date with the information relevant to your role and responsibilities.

Existing Users

Once licensed and setup, this module will activate additional features and options within Aperture Data Studio including:

• New user permissions relating to the management of the Catalog.
• Surface options to register various objects in the catalog.
• Unlocking the toggle in the main user interface to move from the workflow designer to the new Catalog interface.

Registering Rules and Validation Results

Existing users of Aperture Data Studio will already be familiar with the theme of reusability and how functions, views and entire workflows can be developed for one purpose and then re-referenced as a reusable object to drive consistency for common data processing tasks. Another one of those items is Rulesets, which collate multiple rules together for consistent reference in different validate steps. When you license the Catalog, you will be able to promote these rulesets and the validation results from execution of these rules up to the Catalog for display within a central library. Once promoted users will be able to:

• Add extra context to the rules themselves (for example assign data quality dimensions, severity, process impact).
• Assign ownership of the rule itself to drive accountability.
• Manage discussions relating to the rules with comments and notifications.
• Crucially these rules can be linked with other objects within the catalog so as aggregated dashboards that summarize results can be displayed (for example against a business process, a business unit or within a data domain).

Interested to learn more?

To learn more about this module, please contact your Experian representative.