Data Governance Matters

Demystifying Metadata Management
or “Cool, a 20G metadata repository….”
By Tom Jesionowski, Prime Data Consulting
© 2008

Try to pitch the idea of a metadata management solution to the average business manager and just watch their eyes glaze over. Most either don’t care or just don’t get why it is something they should spend money on. Add to the problem the overuse of metadata as the holy grail of data management and the problem of getting buy-in gets worse.

The primary problem with the pitch and sales angle is you normally have the technical team at the center of it. Let’s face it if the technical team was really good at sales they would be doing technical sales. To get the funding needed from your business management team, the first task is building common understanding. The concept of metadata management needs to be something that resonates with them.

One question to ask is, “Do they know what the world’s most popular metadata repository application is?” You’ll get some glazed looks and stares, but most likely no answer. The next question is, “How many of you use MP3 players?”

Yes, MP3 players are by far the most popular use of metadata. The music players can sort your music data file by artist, album, song, genre or custom playlist. They provide easy efficient access to the data through metadata management. In a very short time, MP3 players eliminated the need to sort and resort music collections the way John Cusack did in the movie High Fidelity.

Take that understanding and turn it towards your business. What could you do if you knew all the places where you have the field CUSTOMER_NAME, or the variations such as CUST_NM? What could you accomplish with the time your developers and DBA’s spend defining this in their data models for the umpteenth time.

But having the metadata repository alone did not create the tipping point for MP3 players and they won’t for an enterprise metadata repository either. The data entry component plays a critical role. For example, what contributed to the success of the MP3 player was the Compact Disk Database (CDDB) coupled with user submissions. The metadata capture process was distributed and structured for consistency.

This is an important point. A critical success factor for metadata management and the path to avoid the collection of metacrap is process controls, or Data Governance practices. The process must make it easy to enter and easy to retrieve for reuse.

Remember, that first MP3 player you got for your birthday. After getting over how stoked you were, you spent the next couple of days loading your CD collection. Can you imagine what an impossible task that would have been without the CDDB to house and redistribute all that metadata?

Now change the vision, to that last business application your company integrated. The project team had to figure out how to bring over and integrate all that data. How many hours of precious development time needed to be assigned to the task? How much less would it have been with a decent metadata application and process? There is your ROI for a repository acquisition and metadata process development.