A Beginner's Guide to Enterprise Metadata Management in 2024 and Beyond

Stop for a moment and take a mental inventory of all of the business applications your organization relies on. It’s a huge list, right?

Now, think about all of the transactions that pass through each of those applications and systems every day. Each of those transactions shares elements of customer, product, location, and financial data with every application it touches. So, what happens if that data is defined differently across those applications?

Data drives today’s enterprises, and the underlying metadata that defines that data needs to be accurate, accessible, and trustworthy. Basing business decisions, analytics, and intelligence on subpar metadata will negatively impact everything from financial forecasting to marketing strategies to customer satisfaction.

In other words, you can’t afford to have bad metadata. 

Metadata is a key factor in creating and maintaining data consistency and accuracy across all of your applications, systems, and data warehouse. So setting up an effective metadata management strategy is a critical step in creating high-quality data to drive your business.  

What Is Metadata Management?

Gartner defines enterprise metadata management as “the business discipline for managing the metadata about the information assets of the organization. Metadata is ‘information that describes various facets of an information asset to improve its usability throughout its life cycle.’”

Although that definition tells us what metadata management is, it doesn’t really explain what it does. Let’s dig in a bit. 

Enterprise metadata management fulfills several functions critical to business outcomes: 

• Improves the flow of data between subscribing systems, applications, and data warehouse

• Automates change management, which reduces errors, creates consistency, and increases compliance

• Enables comprehensive data governance

• Provides enterprise-wide insight into data and the impact of changes on specific systems

• Promotes better collaboration between IT and business users

The other side of that coin you have to consider is what happens if you don’t implement enterprise metadata management. 

Organizations with low metadata maturity tend to experience challenges, such as reduced visibility into where data comes from, how it’s stored, and, most importantly, what it means.

This lack of insight is a direct result of poorly managed metadata and often leads to distrust of the data and, by extension, the analytics and intelligence that employ this data.

How Metadata Management Is Used in the Enterprise

Metadata management helps ensure data is accurate and accessible to the business by removing silos, managing change, and increasing governance in today’s complex enterprise data environments. In many organizations, this is accomplished through four core capabilities:

1. Classification

Consistent metadata is essential for ensuring different data types from disparate sources is accessible and accurate across every system that uses it. Standardizing metadata classification eliminates ambiguity and creates a shared understanding of what the metadata is, what it does, and where you can find it.

2. Discovery

Metadata discovery is the automation that helps you find the proverbial needle in a haystack. Utilizing a data catalog containing business terms and context for every data asset, metadata “landmarks” make it easier for users to hunt down specific instances and records inside of a massive data repository.

3. Lineage

Metadata lineage plays a key role in data governance by creating a traceable record of metadata from its point of origin to its point of use. Lineage validates that a specific change was made, why it was made, and that it was made correctly.

4. Democratization

Once upon a time, metadata management was an IT function. Today, data is at the heart of every business function, and centralized metadata management gives technical and nontechnical users fast, easy access to the accurate, consistent data to do their jobs. 

Enterprise Metadata Management Tools

Today’s enterprise environments are simply too complex to manage metadata manually. Storing, harvesting, updating, and analyzing metadata across disparate systems and multiple business applications is almost impossible without an automated metadata management solution. 

Many organizations run enterprise performance management, corporate performance management, and enterprise resource planning tools plus countless other business applications. Implementing a metadata management platform that integrates seamlessly with popular business tools such as Oracle EPM, SAP, Workday, and OneStream empowers business users to take an active role in managing and leveraging metadata so they can do their jobs more efficiently. 

Data governance is an essential part of your metadata management strategy. So when you’re vetting metadata management tools, be sure to consider how governance fits in. Many of the big names, such as Oracle DRM, sell data governance solutions separately. This can add complexity to your infrastructure, not to mention dollars to your technology budget. 

A unified metadata management and data governance solution, such as EPMware, reduces the challenges and expense of running multiple tools by centralizing, integrating, validating, and governing metadata across all subscribing applications.   

Take Metadata Management to the Next Level

A robust enterprise metadata management strategy plays a critical role in the quality of your organization’s analytics and business intelligence, both of which contribute to the company’s bottom line. 

To learn more about metadata management and the role data governance plays in maintaining accurate, accessible data you can trust for strategic decision-making, download our newest e-book, Navigating the Enterprise Data Governance Landscape.