A guide to managing data and information

Peter Benson, quoted by Jim Harris, has very nicely expressed one of my pet bugbears – “Mention the word metadata and you have immediately lost all but the hardcore techies and they have neither the authority nor the budget to solve the problem. “

1. The importance of metadata
2. The Enterprise Data Catalog
3. What is metadata?
4. Types of metadata
5. The business impact

The importance of metadata

As data management professionals, we all understand the importance of metadata.

The problem we face is that the concept of metadata – information about information – is all-encompassing and means different things depending on the context and who you are talking to, as discussed in our post on understanding different approaches to metadata management.

IT Architects argue eloquently for the need for a consolidated metadata repository.

The Enterprise Data Catalog

A single repository that holds everything from the business definition of terms (“How do we calculate GROSS PROFIT”) to a dictionary of data definitions (“Where and how do we store Product codes?”), to active data statistics (“How many Null values do we have for Client ID in the Orders table?”) has become both technically feasible and, one might argue, a business essential.

Governed enterprise data catalogues, like Precisely Data360, leverage integration to data quality tools, automated harvesting of a variety of metadata, machine learning, and advanced collaboration tools to support capturing and maintaining this information in a centralised knowledge repository that serves every knowledge worker.

What is metadata?

For me, the problem boils down to the fact, as discussed in Jim’s post The Metadata Continuum, that metadata in itself has no standards. The old definition that “metadata is data about data” is not helpful and must be retired.

Metadata is the foundational data management capability used to transform data into information by providing business and technical context. It provides essential details about your organisation’s information assets, such as:

• What it means
• Where it resides
• How it is stored
• What it is used for
• Whether or not it is Personal data
• and much more.

Simply put, metadata provides a comprehensive, shared understanding of where data resides in your organisation and how it is used.

Types of metadata

I would like to suggest that we, the data management community,  need to be a bit more specific and a bit more pragmatic if we want to get business support.

If we are trying to create consensus as to the “calculation of Gross Profit” or “the definition of a Customer” maybe these (and similar concepts) can be categorised as our Business Glossary (say)?  Maybe our Data Quality rules are classified as just that – Data Quality rules?

This helps our stakeholders, both business and technical to clearly understand what context is being proved and why this matters.

The business impact

In my opinion, business users may be interested in ensuring that all BI reports calculate Gross Profit using the same formula and, as a result, show consistent values.

They probably don’t care about a metadata repository that will link every piece of information (at every level) in the business. But that capability may be extremely valuable to an IT team trying to respond rapidly to changing business requirements.

By breaking the metadata challenge down into smaller pieces we can make it more achievable and may find it easier to get buy-in from business stakeholders.  

At the very least – hopefully – we will all be talking about the same thing!