Overview of IBM InfoSphere Blueprint Director

You can use InfoSphere® Blueprint Director to define and manage a blueprint of your information project from initial sketches through delivery.

Information integration and transformation are a part of every organization. New systems, infrastructure changes, and new business processes require that the information is restructured, moved, or distributed in new ways. All of these scenarios might result in significant changes to the information project. To foster collaboration and effective practices, you can use InfoSphere Blueprint Director to share the project information with all members of your team.

Teams typically rely on a whiteboard and drawing tools to document the overall solution outline and vision of the information project. This solution outline is often captured in drawings that are disconnected from other artifacts, such as:

Detailed design documents that focus on distinct parts of the projected solution
Project requirements that are frequently defined in team meetings
Technical artifacts such as the metadata from a model that represent parts of the evolving solution

InfoSphere Blueprint Director includes several major capabilities that enable governance teams to develop a common blueprint of the information project:

Use templates to build a blueprint according to information project standards: Installed templates include the topology and methods to support scenarios, such as business intelligence (BI) and warehousing information projects.; Use the method content from IBM® Rational® Method Composer to implement effective work processes. You can manage, author, measure, and deploy effective processes that are tailored to your project needs with an Eclipse-based tool.
Associate assets with blueprint elements: You can download terms from the business glossary of IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog to your local business glossary and then associate them with blueprint elements.; You can associate other assets such as jobs, databases, and mapping projects. You can view these assets in the associated applications: InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog, IBM InfoSphere Data Architect, or IBM InfoSphere DataStage®.
Associate external assets that are not in the catalog with blueprint elements: You can associate assets whose metadata is not stored in the catalog of InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog. These assets include IBM Cognos® models, sections of Microsoft Office documents, general files, and web addresses.
Free-form sketching: You can add standard Eclipse shapes to a blueprint diagram. Each shape has an input and an output connector so that you can link shapes to other blueprint elements.
Create conceptual elements from terms: You can drag a term from the Glossary Explorer pane to a diagram to create a conceptual entity.
Publish blueprints for use by other team members: You can publish blueprints to the catalog of InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog so that other users can view and import them into InfoSphere Blueprint Director.