9801-Via

Terry Moriarty

Managing the Information Resource through the Information Asset Warehouse

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Data warehouses have become very popular as mechanisms to manage an organization’s business resources. Quite likely, your organization’s data warehouses and data marts have become essential when managing its products, customers, employees, finances and capital assets. But does your organization have a comparable warehouse for managing its information resource? Unfortunately, all to often, the answer is no. If your enterprise considers information to be a valuable corporate asset, then it needs to establish a system of management controls that governs how information is created, maintained, delivered, used and secured. This environment must ensure the integrity of the data that describes the information resource (commonly referred to as "meta-data") as well as the actual business data maintained within the organization’s databases.

An Information Asset Warehouse is an application that manages the enterprise’s meta-data providing a single source for information about the state of the organization’s information asset. The information resource is decomposed into its individual components, such as the programs, files, databases, tables and data items that comprise an application in your application portfolio and the various methodology objects used to describe your business through your data and process models (e.g. entities, attributes, functions, events, business rules). The information asset warehouse manages these components by providing Inventory Control and Configuration Management facilities.

As an inventory control system, the information asset warehouse records data about each information resource component, such as its description, purpose, any rules that govern its behavior and all the names which are used to reference it. As such, the information asset warehouse becomes the organization’s encyclopedia and dictionary for its business and technology vocabulary. The business rules that govern the organization’s behavior are documented as part of the information components that support and enforce those rules. The environment that supports the information asset warehouse provides mechanisms to identify and consolidate redundant information resource components. Mechanisms are also provides to track the changes made to an individual information resource component.

Through the configuration management facilities, the information resource components are linked together to represent the relationships which exist between those components. By navigating the links that exist between information resource components, you can quickly focus in on just those information resource components that address specific areas of the business. Views into the information asset can be defined that highlight closely related components. Linking business model objects to their implementation counterparts in the application portfolio can facilitate requirements tracking. For example, the information asset warehouse can tell you that the Customer entity is implemented through the CUST table and that the Current Ledger Balance attribute is displayed on the Account Maintenance form, printed on report ACCT0233, calculated in program DWE0023 and stored in the data warehouse table CUSTACCT as the CUR_LDGR_BAL column. One of the primary benefits of the information asset warehouse is its ability to identify the degree to which a change to one component can ripple through your entire information asset and supporting application portfolio.

The heart of an information asset warehouse is its "meta-model", a data model that represents the information resource component types and the linkages that can exist between them as entities and relationships. The attributes of the meta-model represent the properties that must be known about each information resource component, such as descriptions, status, security level, the creation date and name of the user who made the last update. Generic models exist that can be used as the starting point for developing your organization’s meta-model. However, since the meta-model reflects the business rules that your organization has established to ensure that its information resource is properly managed, it must be carefully configured to ensure that your enterprise’s specific needs are satisfied.

When designing an information asset warehouse, you must deal with many of the same problems encountered when developing a corporate data warehouse. Today, your meta-data is probably scattered across a number of disparate databases buried within your business and application modeling tools (e.g. computer aided systems engineering (CASE) products), application source code (e.g. jobs, programs, database and network specification and control tables) and text-based specification documents maintained in a word processor or spreadsheet. That data will need to be identified, mapped to the organization’s meta-model, extracted, integrated, and possibly cleansed, as it migrates to the information asset warehouse. The environment that supports the information asset warehouse must serve as the integration point for the organization’s disparate meta-data sources. Ideally, the information asset warehouse is implemented using a repository-centric architecture. In this architecture, a repository product, such as Viasoft’s Rochade, serves as your meta-data’s data store. A repository is an application that has been designed to meet the specific requirements of meta-data management in mind. The information asset’s model is defined to the repository as a Repository Information Model (RIM). Beyond the typical components of any application (e.g. database, screens and reporting capabilities), a repository provides features that allow you to adapts its behavior to your specific meta-data management needs:

Browser that is used as road map to the meta-data housed within your information asset warehouse
Scanners and Parsers that are used to convert the meta-data held in CASE tools or within application libraries into a format that can be imported into the repository’s database
Report Writer that can be used to generate customized output such as impact analysis reports or project deliverables
Import/Export Facilities that allow meta-data to be shared with the other components of your meta-data management environment (e.g. CASE tools, data warehouse OLAP tools)
Application Program Interface that allow other tools or programs to access the data held within the repository
Extensibility facilities that can be used to describe your organization’s meta-model as the repository’s RIM. Typically, these facilities are also used to customize the "look and feel" of the repository’s user interface and the rules it enforces when data is added or changed

Your information asset warehouse is probably the only application in your portfolio whose data is used by all information consumers throughout your organization. The descriptive information about the data displayed on the operational systems’ screens and reports should be incorporated into those applications’ help systems. Likewise, your meta-data serves as the basis for understanding the data available through your various data warehouses and data marts. Most online analytical processing (OLAP) products will import meta-data, which is then used in developing the queries that access the data warehouse data.

Your organization’s meta-data represents the collective knowledgebase about your information resource. Doesn’t it deserve its own data management environment: the information asset warehouse?

Terry Moriarty, president of Inastrol, a San Francisco-based information management consultancy, specializes in customer relationship information and metadata management. Her common business models have been used as the basis of customer models for companies within the financial services, telecommunication, software/hardware technology manufacturing, and retail consumer product industries. You can reach her at terry@inastrol.com.