Making SAP Information Steward a Key Part of Your Data Governance Strategy

Part 3 – SAP Information Steward Metadata Management and Metapedia

Part 1 in our series on Data Governance defined the concept of Data Governance and gave suggestions on how to go about implementing an initial program at a corporate level. Part 2 provided an overview of how SAP Information Steward can help you get started with a Data Governance program and detailed the Data Insight module of the tool. In Part 3, we will now turns towards the Metadata Management and Metapedia module of Information Steward to show how they can help in other areas of Data Governance.

Common Concerns
The following questions and comments coming from within an organization are ones that we hear often:

• How were the values on this report calculated?
• Where is this data being sourced from?
• I can’t trust this report; some values look right but others seem way off base
• What definition of Customer do you mean here? We define it differently
• We view this set of material as Finished Goods, but some other plants view them as semi-finished. We sell these but that other plant is responsible for putting these materials into a large assembly

Mostly these conversations boil down to two main problems:

1. Business users are completely blind to how the data they see in a report has been processed.  They don’t know where it came from or how it was calculated, and therefore they don’t know if it can be trusted.
2. Common terms are being lost in translation across the enterprise. One group defines a term one way, and the rest of the company defines it another. As a result, communication has become challenging as conversations devolve into how to properly define certain terms, rather than solve the actual business problem that has come up.

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About Rich Hauser
Rich is a Manager in the Data & Analytics practice of Protiviti, specializing in Enterprise Information Management.  He has delivered customized Data Governance and SAP BusinessObjects solutions for customers of all sizes across a variety of industries.  With Protiviti, Rich utilizes SAP Data Services and SAP Information Steward.