IBM Information Server, Version 8.1IBM® Information Server FastTrack automates multiple data integration tasks from analysis to code generation, while incorporating the business perspective and maintaining lineage and documented requirements.
For enterprises of all sizes, IBM Information Server FastTrack speeds time to value for strategic initiatives by accelerating the translation of business requirements into data integration projects that solve complex business problems.
In enterprise integration projects, business analysts, data modelers and developers must collaborate effectively. IBM Information Server FastTrack accelerates collaborative development across user roles, products, geographies, and workflow.
Too often, development time is spent not on programming or designing, but on managing and translating differences between languages, work methods, and synchronizing tool output. Schedules slip because excessive time is spent clarifying business requirements and translating how the supporting data is used in the creation of the source-to-target mappings. Typically, time is consumed by the back-and-forth communication necessary to clarify terms or revise incomplete or unclear specifications.
In addition to communication problems, the manual collaboration process is inefficient. In a typical workflow, the data modeler models information sources and targets and then sends these structures to the business analyst. The business analyst manually defines the source-to-target mappings by creating a Microsoft® Excel spreadsheet to print and send to the developer. The lack of automation and audit trails in these labor-intensive processes slows down the project, increases the potential for errors to be introduced, and misses the opportunity to create artifacts that can be stored in a common repository and leveraged by other staff members during downstream processes.
IBM Information Server FastTrack eliminates the need to copy and paste information from various documents that are used to design, review, and dispatch specifications. IBM Information Server FastTrack helps to manage details such as data conversion between a source and target within a mapping, allowing the developer to focus on the more complex logic. IBM Information Server FastTrack transforms artifacts from a variety of sources into details that can be easily understood and consumed by the others. Information is linked together and is accessible in the metadata repository for IBM Information Server, rather than being on a file system in spreadsheet form.
IBM Information Server FastTrack helps translate your business requirements into business applications. Leveraging metadata integration, IBM Information Server FastTrack enables you to discover table column relationships, to link columns to business glossary terms, and to generate jobs that become the starting point for complex data transformation in IBM WebSphere® DataStage® and QualityStage™ Designer. Source-to-target mappings can contain data value transformations that, as part of specifications, define how to build applications.
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