Translate Business Processes to DataConnect
Begin to translate your business workflows into the context of DataConnect in terms of the artifacts required to transform and move the data among applications. Process designs represent workflows and maps represent record and field level data transformation and movement between specific objects within a given workflow.
Use a white board to diagram the business processes and subsequently use a workflow creation tool such as Microsoft Visio or an alternate tool to create and store the workflow diagram. This also helps in communicating with business stakeholders to gather requirements and describe the implementation.
Data Governance
You can improve the overall quality of your data by adding a few easy to implement business rules in the maps and processes. Decide and document the rules to be implemented. Consider areas such as:
• Formatting: Document standard formats for date/time, address, and other commonly used patterns for the systems.
• Validation: Identify business rules for validation (that is, reject invalid email address formats).
• Timeliness: Set policies for data that must be used immediately, rejected, or sent in a separate processing branch for subsequent remediation.
• Completeness: Define rules for accepting, rejecting, or enriching incomplete data. If using acronyms and abbreviations, translate them to complete text using a code table when possible.
Processes
Generally, every business workflow can be represented as a process design. Higher level, multi-step orchestration workflows are process designs similar to lower-level, single operations. Therefore, the same techniques can be applied in both the scenarios.
These process workflows have complete access to the scripting language and a rich set of operational components including a decision step that enables easy to implement business rules. For example, you can evaluate an inbound message or file based on a trading partner specific rule and decide what to do with it. You can send the data in a path designed for human intervention or you can send it in a path with a Transformation Map designed to perform automatic data quality rules.
Transformation Maps
Data transformation can be performed anytime you extract data from one system and/or load it into another system. These interfaces are represented by maps in DataConnect. A map consists of essentially three components:
• A source connection
• A target connection
• Field mappings between the source and target connections
The field mappings can contain expressions that:
• Transform data into values, which conform to the target system schema
• Transform data into values deemed valid by your data governance rules
Schema
Master schema can be used to provide governance inputs to the integration—define a common taxonomy for enterprise wide data and use a canonical schema to standardize data accordingly. These rules can then be leveraged by IT and integration development teams to build conformant transformations.
Last modified date: 08/02/2023