Data provisioning system and method

A computer-implemented system for provisioning data to a plurality of data consumers in an organization, the system comprising:

• an electronic memory;
• and
• a processor that is programmed to:
• present a graphical user interface programmed to:
• (a) present a data consumer in the organization with a data catalog comprising metadata that identifies a plurality of columns in a database available to the data consumer and identifies a data type of each of the plurality of columns without providing the data to the data consumer, wherein the data consists of values the plurality of columns are assigned in particular records, and wherein the data remains located on different data sources from different platforms and only the metadata for the data catalog is centralized;
• (b) present a data provider in the organization with options for specifying access of particular categories of data consumers to the data provider's data;
• (c) present a data steward in the organization with options to view and govern use of the data by the data consumers;
• and (d) receive input from the data consumer, provide the input to a data request module and present the data consumer with output from the data request module, wherein the data request module
• receives a natural language search query and a data attribute through a drag and drop feature of the user interface;
• receives a modification input from the data steward, the modification input being a SQL query to optimize the search query;
• identifies in data sources an existing feed that has already been produced for another data consumer, wherein the existing feed matches the search query, the modification input and the data attribute;
• and
• displays to the data consumer a message indicating that the existing feed is available;
• provide a data preparation module, wherein the data preparation module is programmed to (a) provide an interface to the data sources, (b) provide a data entitlement module to control the types of data presented to the data consumer, and (c) provide a semantic layer that decouples a data source data structure from a data consumer data structure by associating a business name for each column with a technical name for that column, allowing a data consumer to use a query builder to build a query that acts upon technical names of columns while only knowing business names of columns;
• provide a metadata module that collects and stores metadata associated with the data sources and that updates the data catalog based on the metadata;
• and
• provide a data publishing module that receives data from the data sources in response to the request of the data consumer and provisions data to the data consumers, wherein the data publishing module uses an auto code generation module to automatically generate code to execute the data provisioning.