Data is a driving force in today’s enterprise. Every transaction and interaction either consumes or generates data, which needs to be secured, processed, stored, analyzed, and used to support an operational function or achieve a business objective.
When you are dealing with massive amounts of data daily—as many large organizations are—ensuring data is accurate and accessible to the right people and the right systems at the right time gets pretty complicated.
Metadata management helps organizations make sense of these vast quantities of data by providing the who, what, when, where, and why of your data assets so they are discoverable, usable, and valuable.
Metadata is most commonly managed in one of two types of repository: centralized or decentralized. We’re going to take a closer look at both approaches, with a particular emphasis on the benefits of centralizing your metadata management efforts.
The differences between centralized and decentralized metadata are fairly straightforward:
Centralized Metadata: Metadata for every application is copied to, stored, processed, and updated in a single metadata repository. This creates a single source of truth for metadata across the organization.
Decentralized Metadata: Metadata is stored in disparate repositories, usually siloed by application or department. Often these repositories don’t “talk” to each other, which makes it difficult to manage metadata changes efficiently.
In today’s hypercomplex business systems, centralizing enterprise metadata management makes the most sense. However, there is no such thing as a perfect strategy, so there are a few limitations to consider.
First, let’s look at the benefits of centralized metadata.
Increase data integrity.
With a single metadata record housed in the repository, it is easier to keep that record accurate and metadata consistent across all applications.
Decrease data redundancy.
Centralized metadata vocabulary is standardized, so everyone and every application speak the same language.
Improve data security.
A central repository reduces the attack surface by making it easier to control who has access to the metadata.
Simplify change management.
Metadata can be added, deleted, or modified in one place, then pushed out to the appropriate applications.
Streamline updates.
Metadata updates are automatically completed and distributed across the organization.
Lower costs.
Centralizing metadata management reduces staffing, operational, and maintenance costs.
Gain easy access.
Standardized vocabulary and a single, searchable repository makes centralized metadata highly accessible to business users and analytical tools.
And now to the Achilles' heel:
There’s a single point of failure.
Centralized metadata is a single source of truth, but it’s also a single point of failure. If something goes wrong, all of your metadata is affected.
It may cause a performance bottleneck.
A central repository is also a potential bottleneck. Latency issues, network connections, high traffic, and other performance issues can impact metadata accessibility.
It’s difficult to retrieve lost metadata.
Unlike decentralized metadata, centralized metadata isn’t copied in multiple locations, so lost metadata is very difficult to replace.
The biggest issues with decentralized metadata stem from the fact that there is no real alignment of the metadata across applications and business systems. For example, inconsistent vocabulary and definitions make it difficult to track lineage and isolate errors, which ironically, are often the result of users applying different terms to the same metadata.
In short, decentralized metadata management simply doesn’t provide the cohesiveness, accessibility, and integration capabilities today’s complex enterprise environments require.
In many ways, decentralized metadata is the inverse of centralized metadata. Because metadata is stored in multiple locations, there is a higher risk of duplication, data quality suffers, and it is much less accessible to business users.
Centralizing metadata allows business users to manage, govern, and analyze metadata all from a single, easily accessible location.
If you’re interested in learning more about the benefits of metadata management and why data governance must be part of the strategy, download Navigating the Enterprise Data Governance Landscape now.