Almost all the organizations do have questions about their data like what kind of data they have, the source of data, current status, changes made to data, the person who is responsible to access data, etc. These are simple, almost absurd queries and unfortunately, most data consumers waste a lot of time attempting to answer these questions. Metadata helps organizations to answer to these queries and enables to gain and store valuable information regarding organizational data.
For most organizations, data is their lifeblood, and they can’t survive without data. Organizations make use of data for their business activities which also provides them a better understanding of their financial activities, customer behavior, and organizational overview. In the fast-moving digital age, metadata has also gained much importance, and most of the organizations that are dependent on data are making use of metadata for enhancing their capability and also for delivering better customer services.
Metadata has become a hot topic these days and many organizations have understood the increasing importance of metadata. Even though, many organizations are still lagging to implement an effective and efficient data culture and a metadata strategy. In a typical relational database, the metadata for any particular table is mostly structural and accounts for a relatively small percentage of the total data saved. The pace at which organizations are becoming more data-driven, generating, and consuming massive volumes of data, is driving the rising demand for metadata management. Metadata management is required to ensure that data becomes a useful organizational asset by providing a clear picture of what data to produce and consume.
Metadata management is essential for organizations to cope with the growth of data governance, regulatory and compliance requirements, better data quality, augmenting traditional data sources with new sources, allowing more business users to actively interact with data, and accelerating business transformations such as ERP migration and digitization.
Metadata Management
The word “meta” is a Greek word meaning “about the thing itself” and here, in terms of metadata, it refers to the data about the data. The metadata is gaining much importance in recent days and is a critical element for organizations as well. Metadata is generated periodically and gathered from the source, and it offers a way of identifying, characterizing, and categorizing the data. Metadata helps in discovering data, tracking data usage, understanding the relationship between each data set, and analyzing the risk and benefits associated with the data.
Metadata is a crucial asset and earlier everyone was not able to understand the importance of metadata management. Metadata helps organizations in identifying the immense value that is hidden in your data and enable organizations to make use of it. For decades, metadata has been managed to aid organizations in better comprehending, aggregating, categorizing, and sorting data, as well as to give creative methods to extract business value from data, both from a business and a technological perspective, resulting in better decision making. It also fosters improved collaboration between metadata consumers and metadata developers to increase data quality and applicability.
The major benefits of metadata management include:
• Improved Data Quality – To enhance overall data quality by improving time to insights and/or correction, data errors and inconsistencies within interconnected data sources or targets are recognized instantly.
• Quicker delivery of Insights – Metadata management enhances organizational efficiency which will result in faster productivity and project delivery.
• Productivity Enhancement – Automated and continuous metadata management process leads to increased productivity. This will benefit the overall organization’s capability and leads to better growth.
• Regulatory Compliance – By following the regulatory policies like GDPR (Global Data Protection Regulation), HIPAA (Health Insurance and Portability Accountability Act), Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), etc., the data privacy of their clients is ensured.
The businesses started moving towards a system that embraces data, as the pace of business has quietly increased. The amount of data generated and collected has heightened and it was necessary for organizations to get a clear picture of the data which they have and metadata management made it much easier.
Conclusion
For data governance, regulatory and compliance requirements, better data quality, augmenting traditional sources of data with new sources, enabling more business users to actively interact with data, and accelerating the process of business transformations such as ERP migration and digitization all necessitate metadata management. The business value can be enhanced using better metadata management which will further help in improved collaboration, innovation, and risk identification.
The content capture, development, and organization phases of the content lifecycle all require metadata. If you don’t collect relevant Metadata at the same time as the content, you’ll rapidly end up with a collection of stuff that’s difficult to manage, discover, and retrieve.
