Informatica Business Glossary Overview
Business Glossary is made up of online glossaries of business terms and policies that define important concepts within an organization. Data stewards create and publish terms that include information such as descriptions, relationships to other terms, and associated categories. Glossaries are stored in a central location for easy lookup by end-users.
Glossary assets include business terms, policies, and categories that contain information that consumers might search for. A glossary is a high-level container that stores Glossary assets. A business term defines relevant concepts within the organization, and a policy defines the business purpose that governs practices related to the term. Business terms and policies can be associated with categories, which are descriptive classifications.
A data steward publishes terms, categories, and policies after the approval process is complete. To publish many Glossary assets at once, the data steward can create a business initiative. A business initiative contains terms, categories, and policies that are impacted by a business decision or business change. A merger between two organizations is an example of a business change that might impact multiple Glossary assets.
Administrators create glossaries and templates that data stewards use to define business terms, categories, policies, and business initiatives. Data stewards standardize definitions, rules, and valid values for data across the organization.
After an asset is published, Glossary consumers can look up the asset through the Analyst tool. All Glossary consumers can view the history of an asset and follow the asset to receive notifications of changes.
Example
Business users in the sales department of an organization use business language in marketing collaterals and customer interactions. The business users need to use consistent, accurate, and traceable business terms that are easy to look up. Some of the users are business analysts who need to understand the relationship between business and technical metadata.
You assign a data steward to the sales glossary who creates and maintains the Glossary assets. The data steward interacts with subject matter experts in the sales department to define business terms and policies. The data steward categorizes the business terms and policies to make it easy for the business users to find content. The Glossary assets go through an approval before the data steward publishes the assets.
Business users can browse the categories in the Analyst tool or search the glossary to look up business terms. The users can view related terms, refer policies that govern the terms, and see linked data assets and rule assets to understand technical metadata related to the term.