Despite increasing recognition today that data is a strategic asset, many business users are not taking full advantage of their organizations' data estates because they do not have a complete picture of the data that is available to them and the data governance framework that is in place.

In 2021, we released a SaaS-based Data Dictionary to address these challenges by providing a web-based interface that allows users to see what data is available within their organization. The portal includes important data governance metadata, such as how the data is defined, where it has come from, who owns it and who has altered it. The Data Dictionary complements our well-established data-agnostic workflow automation platform, Enterprise Data Management (EDM) for Energy.

Through the Data Dictionary, users can browse their own repositories to better understand underlying structures without needing to comprehend the various data model terms. The Data Dictionary describes connected repositories in a common language, presented with full metadata descriptions that clarify terms and enable deep understanding of the concepts for business users. For example, the Data Dictionary can map BH_Latitude in one data model and Bot_Hole_Lat in another data model to Bottom Hole Latitude in a way that is understandable for a business user.

OSDU Forum

The new capabilities we have delivered through the Data Dictionary are particularly significant in the context of the exciting work that is being done by the OSDU Forum to increase the interoperability of data across E&P companies.

The OSDU Forum is dedicated to establishing an open source, standards-based, technology-agnostic data platform that will enable innovation, industrialize data management, and empower organizations to bring new products to market quickly.

With the launch of the resulting OSDU Data Platform, companies are beginning to accept that data structures should not be proprietary and that leveraging a common platform will enable them to make well-informed business decisions more effectively.

Widespread adoption of the OSDU Data Platform will allow operators to focus on the business of making decisions, in the knowledge that high-quality data is seamlessly available to all connected platforms for analysis.

Managing the transition

Whether they decide to invest in a specific corporate data lake or leverage the broader support of the OSDU Data Platform, operators must create a plan to manage the transition in the way that is least disruptive to their daily operations while also providing transparency into the process.

The combination of our EDM and Data Dictionary offerings provides an integrated solution for easing this transition to the OSDU Data Platform. EDM enables connectivity, data quality and data mastering between subscription and local data sources to provide a consistent and corrected view of data.

Beginning with the current, hybrid environments, EDM can easily connect to and provide visibility into the full breadth of data from both on-premise and cloud-based systems. EDM can then be used to automate the process of consolidating and cleansing data assets to prepare both the data and metadata for introduction to frameworks such as the OSDU Data Platform.

Users may continue to work in their specialist applications throughout the transition, with EDM mastering data and managing data translation and distribution between on-prem systems and the new data platform, while also providing transparency into the processes.

As new SaaS applications are created, EDM can be expanded to perform data conditioning and workflow automation directly on the new data repositories. This ensures that decisions are made based on complete data of known quality that is sourced from on-prem and cloud-based applications.

Throughout this process, our Data Dictionary provides the glue to examine and understand the context around each of the data repositories, empowering users with greater visibility into their data. As mentioned, the Data Dictionary portal includes valuable data governance metadata.

Because the Data Dictionary leverages metadata that already exists in the EDM platform, it can deliver a quick deployment for existing clients. A business glossary mapping feature supports the onboarding of data sources from systems outside EDM, creating a view of the entire data estate across the organization.

In this way, our EDM and Data Dictionary offerings complement the OSDU Data Platform, enabling a common understanding of data between business and technology users and streamlining the migration of data to the cloud.

Find out more about how we are helping organizations adopt the OSDU Data Platform

S&P Global provides industry-leading data, software and technology platforms and managed services to tackle some of the most difficult challenges in financial markets. We help our customers better understand complicated markets, reduce risk, operate more efficiently and comply with financial regulation.

This article was published by S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.