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Metadata Management: Lots of Hidden Potential|
- By Abhinna Shreshtha, Dec 31, 2007 1645 hrs IST
- Tags : Metadata Management Lots of Hidden Potential
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What exactly is metadata? The simplest definition of metadata could be that it's data about data or descriptive information about data.
According to Vijay Mhaskar, senior director (Development, Net Backup) of Symantec, India, metadata management is also referred to as content management. It involves categorizing the data into objects and storing various attributes of the data objects in the metadata. The sole purpose of keeping this in metadata is to help search and index the data based on the metadata. For example, if the user would like to search quotations from a specific vendor, a query to metadata would help source all quotations from the data that relate to the specific vendor.
Experts agree that metadata management has a number of potential benefits for enterprises. Here, we discuss a few advantages of having an efficient metadata management solution within your enterprise.
Support of compliance and regulatory reporting through data lineage
This implies tracing each figure in a compliance report back to the originating source and data definition -- in other words, unambiguous and precise descriptions of data items and algorithms. This would help drive down compliance costs. It's also a required component of compliance reporting.
Change management
This is the ability to provide full impact analysis for any proposed change to any IT component or layer. This enables organizations to define the scope of regression testing for new or changed data feeds or reporting requirements.
Single version of the truth
Every reporting or analysis tool shares access to a single definition of the meaning and context of all data. This avoids the same data being interpreted differently by users of different tools. This, along with change management, improves productivity. It also contributes to increasing revenues through better marketing, sales tracking, supplier management, etc. and decreasing costs by reducing time to implement change and by reducing reconciliation costs and delays.
Metadata management as a core component of data governance
This is a new idea for many Indian organizations. It brings together business ownership of data with IT stewardship to maximize the value of an organization's data. The idea of data governance as a high-level and authoritative organization function -- reporting directly to the CIO or board - hasn't gained ground in India: data governance can be a major driver to reduce the cost and speed the rate of growth of an organization.
In spite of all these benefits, metadata management hasn't shown widespread adoption in India, at least till now.
"Characterizing Metadata as a technology contributes: it's a very business-enabling set of functionality and data that IT departments mayn't map to a single product or IT need. So, it becomes "nice to have" rather than an integral part of the IT Strategy," says Dennis Samuel, senior VP (India and SE Asia) of Teradata.
He further adds that when each application or business function is viewed in isolation, metadata can seem an expensive and difficult overhead. It's only when an organization looks across systems and business functions that the true costs and lost opportunities of not implementing metadata management become apparent. India is on the cusp of a huge growth in data warehousing. So, metadata management will become a reality over the next few years.
(This article is being republished to include the Slide Show feature.)
Related Links:
Data Management: A Must for Enterprises
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