Define information governance policies and information governance rules

You define information governance policies and rules for the entire organization to ensure clarity and compatibility among departments, projects, or products.

Information governance policies
Ensure that your information governance policies meet these requirements:
  • Fulfill a business objective
  • Are relevant and understandable to all users of the policy
  • Can be supported by information governance rules and operational rules
Information governance policies can contain subpolicies. The parent information governance policy needs to be sufficiently broad to encompass all of its subpolicies.
Information governance rules
You can define information governance rules that are specific statements of behavior that support information governance policies.
Information governance policies are typically broad in scope. Generally, information governance rules are derived from information governance policies and are more specific. The rules define the actions to take in specific situations to implement the policy. In IBM® InfoSphere® Information Governance Catalog, you can specify that an information governance policy refers to one or more information governance rules.
Note: The names of glossary assets are case-sensitive. It means that for example terms Address and ADDRESS are treated as two independent assets.

Example

Suppose that in InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog you define the Customer Data Quality information governance policy. This policy describes the overall business objective of maintaining and delivering high-quality data about customers. The Customer Data Quality information governance policy references several information governance rules. One such rule is Country Names valid value standardization, which states that values for country names for customer addresses must be from a particular list.

After you define the information governance policy and rule, you must define their data sources. In this example, the database CUST_COUNTRY_INFO contains the country information about each customer. The database COUNTRY_NAMES contains the list of approved country names.

After the data sources for the information governance policy and rule are defined, you create an operational rule, in the form of an InfoSphere Information Analyzer data rule. This data rule specifies that CUST_COUNTRY_INFO must only contain values from COUNTRY_NAMES. This data rule in InfoSphere Information Analyzer implements the Customer Data Quality information governance policy in InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog.

The following figure illustrates these relationships, which you can define in InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog:
Figure 1. Relationship of policies and rules in InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog and InfoSphere Information Analyzer
Figure showing relationships between information governance policies, information governance rules, data rule, and the source database, as described in the text