 |
Clockwork is a powerful and flexible software solution that helps guarantee the information accuracy and completeness of your Business Intelligence applications. In other words, Clockwork closely monitors and maintains Data Quality. |
|
|
|
|
Clockwork significantly reduces the time and costs associated with validating the integration of your information into a single version of the truth by performing periodical checks and by providing reports on the information integration process to make sure it is correct and comprehensive.
Clockwork can be used either in a new project or within your company's existing environment as well as with any vendor supplied solutions.
What is Clockwork?
A software solution that acts as an Information Quality Steward and enhances information completeness and accuracy.
It is a comprehensive software solution made up of three major components: Clockwork Repository, Clockwork Validation Objects and Clockwork Reports.
Clockwork is designed to automate the process of validating new information as it is brought into your Business Intelligence environment. Finally, it accumulates information on the integration process allowing for detailed reporting.
Benefits include:
- Accuracy & Completeness: Users benefit from complete and accurate reports. Analytical reports balance with the operational environment where they should.
- Timeliness: Clockwork increases report availability to end users by automating the validation of information integration that would otherwise require a significant amount of time by specialised personnel, to assure the desired quality level for the newly loaded data.
- Consistency: Automatically monitors continuously the information integration processes to ensure complete and accurate information throughout the analytical environment and in case of problems, initiates proper recovery procedures.
- Compliance: Regulatory bodies' requirements for reconcilable and auditable information are satisfied thru the built-in reporting features.
- Ease of integration: Clockwork is built on an architecture that easily blends into your existing environment, thus allowing for minimal deployment effort.
- Efficiency: Enables valuable Business and IT personnel to focus on high priority issues rather than on validating information accuracy.
How does Clockwork Operate?
1. Clockwork integrates within your information movement workflow for a step-by-step consistency check. It performs periodical queries on the data warehouse to detect the accumulation of noise in the data created by generally accepted data transformation activities such as:
- The substitution of default values where no value is found;
- The arbitrary allocation of an adoptive parent for orphan transactions;
- Semantic rules verifications.
The accumulation of the above over time will skew the business analysis performed downstream. By periodically assessing this situation, you can take corrective actions.
2. Clockwork monitors the information integration workflow by:
- Controlling the information to be integrated by ensuring the chronological order of the load cycles is followed and jobs within a given load cycle run in the appropriate sequence;
- Controlling job execution during load cycles by interacting with the job scheduler in order to control the data load workflow based on validation results and initiating automated recovery processes when required.
3. Clockwork provides reporting capabilities as follows:
- Gathers load job execution metrics such as number of rows read, written and rejected, name of load process, execution date and time, execution duration, etc. These metrics serve as technical job validation parameters and as execution statistics for reporting and trending analysis;
- Audits processes and load metrics to validate loads and produce statistics. Metrics like audit process name, audit process completion status, etc. then serve for regulatory reporting purposes such as Sarbanes-Oxley compliant audit reports.
- Centrally stores ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Load) job parameters assignment in a secure manner and eases their overall management.
Also see: Clockwork / High Level Architecture
More on Clockwork
|
|
|
