Data Products
Data products package data and the context you need to confidently use it into a trusted, ready-to-use asset, making your data truly reusable. Each data product comes with clear ownership and quality standards built in, defined once and available to every team that needs the data.
This article introduces what data products are and how they work with domains, business processes, and data elements to capture what your data means and how it’s governed. For instructions about how to create these assets, see Create Data Products, Domains, and Business Processes.
About data products
Data products make scattered data usable for anyone who needs it.
You define what the data is and what standards it should meet, then connect that definition to the catalog items that implement it. Because governance is applied to the data product, it covers every catalog item connected to it.
Multiple catalog items usually implement the same data product. You can mark the one that best meets its standards as recommended, so consumers know which source to use.
In practice, a typical organization has the same business concept implemented many times across the data landscape. Customer data, for example, might live in hundreds of tables across CRMs, data warehouses, lakes, and BI tools, each shaped slightly differently and governed inconsistently. Without a data product, every team that needs customer data has to work out which assets to trust and how to use them — every time.
What you define on a data product includes:
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What the data represents for your business.
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Which attributes it should have and which assets it relates to.
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Which standards apply, such as data quality rules or regulatory requirements.
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Who owns it and where it’s used in the business.
Together, data products, domains, business processes, and data elements let you govern the whole data picture rather than asset by asset.
Domains, business processes, and data elements
These assets provide additional context for data products.
- Domains
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Data areas that group related data products, such as Customer, Risk, or Operations. Can be nested to mirror how the business is structured.
- Business processes
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Activities that produce or consume data, such as Policy Issuance or Customer Onboarding. A business process declares which data elements it uses and which data products it produces or consumes. Can also be nested.
- Data elements
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Terms added to a data product or business process to describe what it should contain, such as Customer ID or Policy Number. They act as the asset’s contract: they declare what should be there, independent of which physical table currently implements it.
Business processes can be marked as critical, in which case their criticality propagates to the data they touch. A data element reflects the criticality of the term it points at. See Criticality.
Next steps
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Create Data Products, Domains, and Business Processes: Create your first data product, domain, and business process.
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Criticality: Learn how criticality propagates across data products, domains, and business processes.
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