Metadata management is emerging discipline and is necessary for enterprises wishing to bolster innovation or regulatory compliance initiatives on their data assets.
Many of them are trying to establish their convictions on the subject and brainstorm solutions to meet this new challenge. As a result, metadata is increasingly being managed, alongside data, in a partitioned and siloed way that does not allow the full, enterprise-wide potential of this discipline.
Is your organization in the process, or in the process of reflecting, the development of a metadata management solution? Metadata management is essential to meet the growing demands of data governance, data risk and compliance, as well as data analysis and value generation.
In order to support this discipline, you will have to choose a metadata management platform. Simply put, these solutions must enable data managers to capture, store and aggregate metadata from the enterprise IS on a single platform.
You will soon realize that the market is complex: the solutions are diverse and their scope or capacity more or less limited. Take some time to assess the functional capabilities of your metadata management solution to help you:
Centralize your efforts
Ensure that metadata efforts are not isolated but centralized and unified.
In this way you will avoid reproducing silos of information in the same way that data has been siloed in the past. To do this, check the platform’s operational ability to integrate and manage assets coming from different sources of information.
After all, metadata is everywhere in your IS: applications, relational or non relational databases, the cloud, business glossaries, data dictionaries or even Excel files!
Match your context
We are firmly convinced that it is not up to the company to comply with the solution’s documentation model, but rather the other way around!
By adopting a modular and customizable solution, you will be able to adjust, prioritize and add the missing and necessary elements for your data consumers. From this approach, take a step-by-step approach to incremental and iterative metadata governance that fits your context according to your priorities. So take some time to collect the needs and difficulties of your data users and consumers. Then, create a template of relevant documentation for your consumers that will ultimately guide your metadata collection efforts.
Quicken the pace (and well!)
We consider the automation of the ingestion and the intelligence of the solution as the key factors of success! These capabilities will allow you to automate the most tedious tasks, offer synergies in your data assets in order to document and contextualize your data in an ever increasing and better way. Under the regulatory prism, for example, an intelligent platform will be able to identify through its already existing documentation which data sets are considered «sensitive» and contain personal data.
Explore your metadata
Aggregating IS metadata into a platform only makes sense if it is shared across the enterprise and easily accessible by your data consumers. Data catalogs respond to this first use case:
The easier it is for the user to access the information, the better the data catalog! To enable analysts, data scientists and other data consumers to find and understand an enterprise’s data assets in order to extract value from them
Start metadata management in just 6 weeks.
In many organizations, metadata management is still a manual, extremely time consuming task undertaken by more technical profiles for technical profiles.
As a result, metadata management as a discipline has gone largely unnoticed by data and analysis stakeholders. The ability of teams to explain its benefits or demonstrate its value has been and continues to be difficult.
Download our guide to start your enterprise metadata management journey! In this white paper, we share our advice and expertise on implementing iterative metadata management optimized for your context.
