Overview and purpose of TIBCO Cloud™ Metadata
Why do I need metadata management?
Chaotic management of metadata can lead to losing control over your operations, the incapacity to leverage or analyze data and a possible lack of compliance with local and international regulations.
A messy information system is usually defined by inconsistent, duplicated or obsolete data, scattered over several systems that have no centralized management or backbone structure. Access to data is erratic, unpredictable and not monitored. This leads to misunderstandings, governance errors and miscommunication.
What are the solutions?
By taking control over your metadata, you ensure the way you describe, manage and map your company data assets is unified and shared by all parties. This will tremendously help improve your operations and analytical activities. Mutual comprehension between business parties as well as homogeneous and controlled data flows are at the core of a successful business with streamlined processes, and clearly managed data assets.
- To solve the misunderstanding issues on business terms faced by users, the best approach is to implement a business glossary that hosts and organizes all terms and their context-related definitions.
- To solve the issue of inconsistent and scattered information by creating a global and consistent data catalog.
- To solve the issue of scattered and unreliable information, the implementation of a metadata management system ensures the gathering of all data assets under one centralized system.
How is TIBCO Cloud™ Metadata a good match?
TIBCO Cloud™ Metadata is an out-of-the-box cloud solution powered by TIBCO EBX based on a SaaS model and provides end-to-end metadata management. It is distributed through TIBCO CIC. It allows to govern, master, map out and exchange your data. The solution is easy to use thanks to its clean, user-friendly interface. It allows a complete control over the quality of the data in your business processes from end to end, and is a comprehensive tool to clearly identify your data management needs.
TIBCO Cloud™ Metadata offers the following management solutions:
- The data catalog: helps documenting your information system through classifying your data sources in order to have a well-defined view of your information system via different lenses: technical profiles, business profiles, and data specialists profiles. It allows you to document and map your data, identify the needs and bridge potential gaps.
- Business glossary: shared business terms and vocabulary repository allowing all parties to share and communicate with regards to the data. Unify the vocabulary used to facilitate communication and exchanges between business domains. This will solve: vocabulary issues, redundancy and duplicates issues, obsolescence issues, quality consistency, quicker and easier access to information, global accelerator to the IS performance and data usage, optimization of the data management globally and holistically.
- Metadata management: Value from data can be obtained by using metadata to inventory, assess and analyze data assets. This use case focuses on the future. Metadata and data is analyzed for potential value-add, including the identification of additional metadata capturing or additional datasets for enrichment. It includes support for data valuation methodology. It is about enhancing the experience that users have while interacting with the solution/product and ensuring that different personas (data stewards, data analysts, information architects, IT and data engineers) find the appropriate virtual environment in which to work. It’s also about creating a collaborative experience.
Who can use TIBCO Cloud™ Metadata?
TIBCO Cloud™ Metadata addresses a wide diversity of users in many different business situations. From business users to data architects, data engineers, data stewards, analysts, application architects, application owners, DPO, etc., and will provide them with collaborative workflows. The solution supports role-based access which ensures appropriate exposure of key data elements, while at the same time providing needed compliance.
In this product documentation, we’re going to consider the following profiles, however you always have the possibility to define additional roles:
- Read-only users
- Administrators
Where do I start?
In order to start using TIBCO Cloud™ Metadata, there are two main types of approaches:
- Bottom up examples: starting with mapping out the information system, a metadata catalog initialization or an application owner who wants to retro-document their application.
- Top down examples: the Architecture Board launches an information system cartography project, from the business/applicative architecture to the technical architecture.
These approaches are given as examples and many other use cases will be explored in the user guide.