Key terms

Application

Software, services, reports, or other documents that exploit, manipulate, or expose data. Applications can serve business processes and be subject to rules.

Asset

Any container or provider of structured data that can be referenced and documented. System instances can contain or expose assets and assets can be comprised of other assets. For instance, an Excel file is an asset. It contains sheets which contain tables, columns, lines and cells—all of which are assets. Assets can supply and be supplied by other assets via a technical flow.

Business process

A collection of related activities or tasks completed in a specific sequence. They produce business value in the form of a product or a service for a customer or user.

Business term

Word or phrase that describes a concept used in a branch or domain. A business glossary governs and communicates business terms.

Data element

An atomic unit of data that has precise meaning or semantics. It can represent a complex object such as a Customer or a Product, or it can define a simple value such as a Birth date or a First name. Simple data elements are combined to create more complex elements. For example, a Customer is composed of a Person, which is composed of a First name and other data elements. A data element can also have a relationship with other data elements.

Dataset

A collection of data of the same structure that defines a population of the same data element, or set of data elements. A dataset can be an exhaustive list of countries or a list of French customers aged 18-24. In these 2 examples, we have a natural link between the dataset and one high level data element which are respectively Country or Customer. However, it can be more complex or less natural, such as a list of product entries from an ERP which can represent different data elements with the same structure for technical convenience.

Environment

Any application can exist in or on many environments for different reasons. It can be due to a geographical organization where an application must be redundant for non-functional requirements. It can also be due to the business or structural organization where the segregation of duties implies the creation of many separated environments. But most likely, it is required for the build and configuration of the application that needs to be tested and qualified before to go to production. An environment is then composed of all the system instances its architecture relies on.

Flow

The movement of data between two applications. Exchange of data can include many individual flows between sources and targets. At a logical level, technical flows define and allow data exchange to occur. Additionally, they specify a flow's non-functional requirements and any information that could help understand or build them.

Group

Group of persons, includes users of the application as well as non-users, but all persons of the group are meant to have a role in the management of data: dataset owner, system manager, etc. Examples of groups are: Marketing group, IT group, etc.

Identifying this group of persons will be used to assign them the ownership of a documented object, e.g.: system, instance, etc. The responsibilities linked to the management of the various objects are also linked to groups.

Infrastructure

Foundation or frameworks that supports systems. It is composed of physical or logical resources that support storage, processing, analysis and exchanges of data. An infrastructure is in most case a physical or virtual server running an operating system.

Instance

Concrete installation of a given system, it can be the installation of a software, a file system, a service provided by a service provider, an internal service, or any other container of provider of data assets or components of any application. It runs on an infrastructure.

Link

It materializes the relation between two data elements in data assets. It then defines how the links between two assets are ensured in the containing system. It can be a database foreign key, an hyperlink, or just a code or any other technical representation.

Relation

Linking two data elements, it makes one the representation of the other. It defines why the data elements are related and in which conditions. It can also carry rules. There can be many relationships between two same data elements. A "Company" can be both the "Supplier" and the "Customer" of another "Company". As different rules can apply to these two cases, it is interesting to be able to create two different relations instead of one with a multiple condition.

Role

This is not the definition of users roles within EBX® but roles upon data in the information system. A role is not necessarily active on data governance or data management but can define, for instance, a passive notified role. Each element of a RACI matrix can then be defined as a role given to a list of groups of persons.

Rule

Defines or limits some aspects of a given data category to control or influence the behavior of business data. It is used for making decisions and for governing programs or policies.

Provider

Any company providing one or many systems. It can be a software vendor, a system integrator or any other outsourcing company, but it can also be an internal organization.

System

Any technical component that participates to the elaboration of an application, but also any technical component that provides or uses data. A system is then materialized by an instance.

Technical flow

A data aims to be used but is also sourced. It then comes from an origin going though intermediaries to reach a final destination before reaching another in the future. Each step in this journey that is a flow between two or many applications is a technical flow. It defines the bridge between two assets, telling at any level what is the source of any target.