Master Data Management, the reseller for Collibra in South Africa, has announced the latest integration of Collibra’ Data Governance Centre with IBM Infosphere, extending clients’ investment in IBM Infosphere to a wider business audience.

Historically, data management has been dominated by technically oriented tools, such as IBM’s Infosphere stack for big data analytics, data integration, data warehousing and master data management. Business oriented roles, such as data stewards and business analysts, may have found themselves unable to contribute effectively to the data management discussion due to the technical complexities of these tools.

“The business user oriented approach from Collibra allows companies to get more from their IBM investment by providing the framework for successful data governance,” says Gary Allemann, MD of Master Data Management.

Data governance expert, Sunil Soares, of Information Asset, is excited by this development. Soares says, “My company has a strong partnership with both IBM and Collibra, and I am well versed in both sets of technologies. This integration will help IBM’s enterprise clients get the most value from their Data Governance programs. For example, organisations can govern reference data in Collibra and propagate any changes to DataStage.

“Companies can use the REST API to integrate Collibra and Business Glossary. In addition, we have shown how terms in Business Glossary can be integrated with reference data in Collibra. Finally, clients can manage policies and standards in Collibra while enforcing them in Optim, Guardium, MDM and Metadata Workbench.”

Key components include the organisational structure, roles and responsibilities and out of the box Data Governance workflows. This allows data stewards, and other stakeholders, to govern data compliance to policies, set up and share the business glossary, govern reference data, and manage data issues.

This further provides the answers to three deceptively simple questions, which have previously been difficult to answer:
* What does my data mean?
* Where and how is my data used?
* Who is responsible for my data?

“Collibra is positioned by Gartner as a ‘cool vendor for Enterprise Information Management’ and has been quoted as a champion of Governance by Blur Research, providing testimony to the company’s innovation and leadership in this space. Coupling Collibra with IBM’s technologies for master data management, or big data analytics, provides clients’ with a powerful combination to deliver value.

“Collibra enhances IBM’s solutions by drawing in the business user, a critical success factor for both MDM and Big Data initiatives,” concludes Allemann.