How Automation Alleviates Problems with Enterprise Metadata Management

Although it’s next to impossible to pinpoint the exact amount of structured and unstructured business data being generated and consumed every day, it’s safe to say that between video, text, images, streaming, and voice data, we’ve exceeded the capabilities of manual data—and metadata—management.

Metadata Plays an Essential Role in Today’s Enterprise Data Management Strategies

Accurate, complete metadata is critical to understanding and building trust in the business data that is used to feed analytics and distill insights. Without effective enterprise metadata management, data quality degrades, risk increases, and innovation and collaboration suffer.

To address today’s enterprise data challenges, many organizations are automating their metadata management efforts. Using intelligent solutions to increase metadata-handling efficiency and support governance initiatives, companies can improve workflows, enhance business processes, and empower analytics and insights.

Advantages of Automated Metadata Management

Automating metadata management streamlines many essential workflows and allows organizations to extract the maximum value from their data in several key ways:

• Less time spent on data tagging, cataloging, and linking
• Increased intelligence that helps uncover hidden insights and connections
• Reduced risks and fewer challenges when scaling
• More complete datasets for analytics so results are more insightful and accurate 
• Improved efficiency because data teams can more quickly identify, locate, and access the data they need
• Higher trust in data being used for analytics and the results of those analytics
• Better compliance with security and privacy regulations

In short, automating metadata management provides intelligence that helps connect all of your data across the organization. This allows users to quickly deploy standardized metadata across target applications with one click, so they have access to trustworthy, accurate data when they need it.

How Automated Metadata Management Impacts Data Governance

Data governance establishes and enforces the processes and policies that make sure your data and metadata are accurate, secure, and well managed throughout the organization. 

Aligning your data governance strategy with your enterprise metadata management processes enables cross-departmental cooperation between business and IT to deploy consistent, trustworthy data across all upstream and downstream applications and systems. 

Automating metadata management makes it easier to achieve these goals by ensuring your business glossary, data dictionary, and data catalog are always complete, consistent, and current.

Let’s take a closer look at the role automated metadata management plays in each of these tools.

Business Glossary

A business glossary is a shared collection of frequently used concepts and definitions, including metadata, pulled from various data catalogs and data assets. The glossary provides a single source of truth and context by standardizing language for business and technical users.

An automated metadata management solution ensures the terms and concepts in the glossary are consistent, accessible, and up to date, which enables fast, accurate searches across all of your data storage types.

Data Dictionary

A data dictionary dives a bit deeper into data and metadata by providing more detailed definitions, identifying relationships to other data and where it fits in the overall structure, and describing data dimensions and measures. 

An automated enterprise metadata management solution ensures that terms and technical metadata are used correctly and consistently throughout the organization, which facilitates searches across databases. 

Data Catalog

A data catalog is the bridge that connects the business glossary to the data dictionary. The data catalog provides an inventory of all of an organization’s data assets that both business and technical users rely on to identify relevant datasets and locate them fast.

An automated enterprise metadata management solution can maintain the data catalog and ensure standards are upheld across all databases, which reduces risk, improves data efficiency, and provides easy access to accurate data. 

Integrating automated metadata management into your data governance strategy improves the accessibility and value of datasets by enforcing data quality rules, eliminating ambiguity, and standardizing structure, context, and dimensions across all data assets.

Do More with Your Enterprise Metadata Management Strategy

In today’s data-powered enterprises,  access to accurate, trustworthy metadata is vital to distilling insight and value from the high volume of data businesses generate and consume daily. 

An automated metadata management solution allows even nontechnical business users in your organization to create, manage, and maintain workflows that deploy standardized, rationalized metadata to the right target systems at the right time.

Download the e-book, Navigating the Enterprise Data Governance Landscape, to learn more about how enterprise metadata management can support your data governance efforts, increase your data quality, and, as a result, improve your overall business outcomes.