For me, the biggest benefit with erwin DI is that I have a single source of truth that I can send anybody to. If anybody doesn't know the answer we can go back to it. Just having a central location of business rules is good. That has come up a lot. The solution gives us data lineage which means we can see an impact if we make a change. The ability for us to have that in this company is brilliant because we used to have 49 data stewards from some 23 different groups within six major departments. Each one of those was a silo unto itself. The ability to have different glossaries — but all pointed to the same key terms, key concepts, or key attributes — has made life really simple. It has given us better adaptability in our EDW and a more standardized way of looking at data, as opposed to all of the different formats. Our experience with the solution's Smart Data Connectors is still limited, but so far we're impressed. For us, it's mostly been reverse-engineering. But because we got to start this whole project from scratch it was really about forward-engineering. One of the advantages is that we wanted to go back through the entire enterprise, and start mapping everything legacy or future. Ultimately, the future is to move to the cloud and rearrange all our data and reprioritize the most important attributes and not have multiple replications of data to our many silos. So the Smart Data Connectors to engineer code have been spot-on. Harvesting reverse-engineering allows us to test and verify some of the things that are odd. It's got a proprietary format that works really well within all the systems and I can export to any format, including my data profiling, my mapping integrator, and any and all of my governance stuff, whether it's within the business rules, the policies, the dictionaries, or the glossaries. I can export that into a CSV or Visio depending on what it is.
