Companies the world over have been managing data in similar ways for decades, and there is a common and unhealthy trend amongst many of them, missing documentation. Companies used to fully document the system design and development lifecycle using modeling tools, and often excel spreadsheets, to capture source-to-target mappings. As time went on, ETL developers became more skilled at interpreting business requirements and making the necessary changes directly in their XML code within the ETL program of choice while foregoing the documentation. Ultimately, as a result of the ever-increasing requirements from the business and shrinking budgets, IT leaders decided to eliminate the costly and time-consuming exercise of data mapping and simply encouraged more of the “Requirements to Code” approach. This went well for a while, and then something very significant happened that uncovered a massive gap in our overall understanding and auditability of data. Individual privacy and data protection legislation happened and almost every business in every vertical found themselves unprepared and a very long way from being compliant. The issue is that not everyone can read code, and the gap between IT, the business, and now auditors has become larger than ever. The good news is that there is a way back, and it is highly automated and less expensive than anyone could have imagined. View this on-demand session to find out more.
