Implementing your own information governance reports with the SQL views of InfoSphere Information Governance Dashboard

You can create information governance reports that are based on SQL views, models, and queries. These reports give you deeper insight into your information governance by identifying more useful forms and patterns in your information assets and metadata.

1. Identify the basic requirements and parameters of your reporting solution by answering these types of questions:
   • Which roles or users have a need for information governance reporting?
   • What are the reporting needs of these roles and users? Some examples of these needs are answers to the following questions:
     • Does the quality of supplier contact records meet a specific target?
     • How many records from a certain information asset, such as a table, miss a defined data quality standard?
     • Do all key information assets have owners?
     • How many information governance policies have information governance rules assigned?
   • What are the underlying metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs)?
   • What data and metadata is required to compute these metrics?
   • How do these users expect the metrics to be visualized?
2. Define the reporting needs in terms of the available metadata.
   Based on the reporting needs identified in Step 1, make sure that the required data is present and properly modeled in IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog and that it is accessible through the SQL views. You define the reporting needs in terms of this metadata and specify the metrics and KPIs of interest. You must have a detailed understanding of the available metadata and how it is used to represent business entities of interest. This understanding includes having the answers to the following questions, among others:

   • Are the required data sources represented in the catalog?
   • What catalog objects are used to represent business entities of interest, for example, terms, categories, information governance policies, and information governance rules?
   • What types of relationships are available to connect which types of entities?
   • Does the catalog use extensions, such as custom attributes or external entities? What are they used for?
   • Are categories or information governance policies modeled as hierarchies? What is the maximum depth of these hierarchies?

   You can use some of the queries that are defined in the example Reporting on the metadata in your metadata repository to answer these types of questions. The answers help identify an effective approach to a reporting solution.

3. Create a dimensional model, define your queries, and then, based on those queries, define your reports.

   Define a data model to be used for reporting. This data model is based on the data sources that are identified in Step 2. Because you might not be able to anticipate some of the reporting needs, the reporting data model must be as flexible as possible in terms of metrics and calculations that can be performed. One well-established method to make analytical data available for processing is to use a dimensional model that consists of facts that provide the core data and dimensions. These core data and dimensions enable viewing and exploring the data from different perspectives that are based on various analytical queries and computations.

   The standard topology for a dimensional model is the star schema where a fact entity is associated with various dimension entities that have a 1:n relationship to the fact.

   

   In a standard data warehouse environment, these entities are tables that are populated by ETL processes. These processes extract the data that are needed for reporting from the operational systems in certain regular intervals and store them in the corresponding fact and dimension tables. In InfoSphere Information Governance Dashboard, facts and dimensions are represented by analytical queries which are based on the SQL views.