I had the great experience of participating in Information Management’s DM Radio panel discussion on metadata this week. Listen to the recording. Information Management’s Eric Kavanaugh and Jim Ericson asked myself, Rob Karel of Forrester Research, and other data quality providers, some pretty provocative questions that moved metadata from ‘data about data’ to defining its value in driving operational success in business processes and clarifying its role as the backbone to describing the business.
As we talked about metadata in this context it really hit home that managing metadata is not unlike managing data. Get your metadata wrong, and you will quickly feel the results of inconsistencies, gaps, and risks in your business. Quite the data quality issue!
Why is that? Jim Ericson brought up the point that metadata can be served up in a service that initiates an action. Think about the status of a claim, the threshold for a stock trade, the instruction to call out to a cloud service. These can all be metadata elements. The implication of poor quality metadata in these instances can mean the rejection of reimbursement for healthcare services rendered, investment loss, or a breakdown or bottleneck in a business process.
When building out your data quality practices, don’t forget about metadata. Profiling, and continuous profiling and monitoring, is key to maintaining alignment of metadata to your business. As your business, market, and processes change, so too will your metadata. Things to consider when determining how to define, measure, and monitor metadata are:
- Make sure your profiling solution is robust enough to account for the quantification of metadata conditions both as a way to check against defined standards or glossaries as well as help discover new metadata.
- Your profiling solution should be available and easy to use by your business data stewards that understand how metadata supports and drives processes, reporting and linkage between their business applications
- There are reporting capabilities that address both context and data structure to ensure there is linkage between what the business needs and expects and how your system will support and serve to that expectation
Metadata is as much about providing context to the business as it is to help data fit within your infrastructure. Keep in mind the quality of your metadata and apply the same methodologies for data governance and stewardship to be successful and drive value to the business as much as to your data management platform.