Developing the Business Data Model

When you develop the Business Data Model (BDM) in the context of a project, BDM is propagated from the enterprise level to the project level and finally to the practitioner level. Then, it is customized based on the scoped business terms, and the changes are harvested at the project level. When all practitioners have harvested their changes at the project level, the project BDM is harvested at the enterprise level. This results in a new version of your enterprise BDM. The development of BDM is not limited to warehouse projects, but the tasks that are described in this user guide only focus on that area.

Before you begin

This task assumes that business terms are properly defined in the context of your project. You can use your own format or the IIW proposed format in Information Governance Catalog (IGC). When the business terms are captured by using the IIW vocabulary in Information Governance Catalog (IGC), the mapping to the corresponding BDM elements is already done for preexisting business terms and this accelerates your development.

About this task

Multiple instances of this task can run in parallel in the following cases:

Multiple practitioners who are working on the same project.
Multiple projects that are running in the enterprise.

The frequency of propagation and harvesting activities is driven by the enterprise model management policies. However, frequently harvested changes minimize the number of conflicts and expedite the harvesting process.

When you develop BDM, propagate its enterprise version into your practitioner version, customize it, and once it has been consolidated at project level, harvest your new version back to the Enterprise stream.

Procedure

Propagate the enterprise version of the BDM into your practitioner BDM. See Propagating data models by using BDM.
Customize your practitioner BDM in your data modeling tool. See Customizing the Business Data Model.
Harvest the practitioner BDM at the project level. For each practitioner at a time, follow the steps in Harvesting data models.
Harvest the projects BDM at the enterprise level. For each project at a time, see Harvesting data models.
Import the enterprise BDM into InfoSphere Metadata Asset Manager (IMAM). See Importing the logical IDA data models into IMAM.
Export the glossary assignments from IDA into IMAM. See Exporting the glossary assignments from IDA into Information Server.

Customizing the Business Data Model
When customizing the Business Data Model (BDM) in the context of a project, look at your scoped business terms. For each business term, identify the entities and attributes that represent it in BDM by applying entity-relationship (ER) modeling techniques and by using the business terms definition. Identify the existing BDM entities and attributes that are relevant to the project. Modify them if needed, and create new ones when they do not exist. Thanks to the generic nature of BDM, limited customization is expected and existing entities should be mapped to new business terms whenever possible instead of defining new ones. This results in a customized project BDM that structures your business terminology and provides a foundation for building your IT assets.
BDM design techniques
Some high-level recommendations need to be considered when customizing the business data model. Enhancements to the Business Data Model have improved alignment with these general modeling guidelines of how and when to customize the business model.

Parent topic: Business Data Model