Enterprise Data Catalog

The United Nations (UN) is requesting your Expression of Interest for an Enterprise Data Catalog platform (EDC). Over the past several years, the organization has witnessed an exponential rate of growth by which data is generated and consumed. Increasingly, these vast amounts of data, which are managed by different entities, are becoming the key foundation of all the high-level decision-making in achieving UN global mandates. This has high-lighted the urgent need to address the following challenges: a) consolidate multiple and fragmented data sources, b) develop overarching policy and governance, and c) help promote a culture that fully recognizes value of data. The Secretary-General’s (SG) Data Strategy aims to “transform the organization and treat data as a strategic asset”, and to achieve the vision by “building a UN ecosystem that maximizes the value of our data.” To achieve this goal, a full understanding of the vast amount of data hosted, managed, and used by different entities in the Secretariat is the first and fundamental step. To support the vision of the Data Strategy, the UN needs to establish a UN Data Exchange Service which will be a central source for users to discover, access, integrate and share the data they need to make data-driven decisions. The foundation for the Data Exchange Service will be an Enterprise Data Catalog based on the Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) framework, a cloud-based solution which brings together the data owners and the data consumers: data owners to register, annotate and publish their data sources, and data consumers to discover, understand and - with the right permissions, protection and governance – have access to and use the data. The Enterprise Data Catalog should be able to provide the necessary data governance mechanism that ensures proper management of data through a set of policies, guidelines, procedures and standards. Additionally, it should provide the capability for managing the master datasets centrally to ensure data quality and interoperability across the Organization.