ASG Launches Application for Managing Reference Data

Six Big Business Intelligence Mistakes

Thanks mainly to a growing number of compliance requirements, investments in data governance have increased over the years. But at some point, a set of terms that becomes the way certain actions and processes relating to how the business operates needs to be defined.

With that goal in mind, ASG Software Solutions today launched ASG-metaRDM, an application for capturing reference data upon which an organization’s data governance policies can be based.

Ian Rowlands, vice president of product management, ASG Software Solutions, says ASG-metaRDM extends the ASG data governance portfolio based on a Rochade metadata repository and metaGlossary applications by providing a mechanism through which business terms can be standardized across the organization.

In theory, standardizing terms should be relatively simple. In practice, it turns out that over time, different business units often begin to describe the same process differently. This can be compounded, notes Rowlands, when two organizations merge and there is a need to quickly standardize on a single set of processes.

As part of that process, ASG-metaRDM provides mechanisms for maintaining accountability of terms, agreement among terms, and audit trails that track any changes that are made.

Deploying a reference data application may not seem like the most mission-critical of all enterprise applications. But when it comes to root cause issues associated with dysfunction across most businesses, more often than not, a failure to agree on basic terms to describe events winds up creating nothing less than the business equivalent of the Tower of Babel.