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Metadata Solutions
The goal of a Metadata Solution is remove the shroud of mystery that surrounds data in today’s organizations. Data is usually the victim of well-meaning business and technology personnel that do not understand the implications of changing data values or business rules, but nevertheless make updates. Metadata Solutions are designed to provide lineage reporting back to the business community. Imagine the business value of being able to run a report or a query that will tell you the complete lineage trail of data. Consider the scenario that you are looking at a report that was produced from your organization’s data warehouse. On that report you spot a number such as net sales or net income, and you really question the accuracy of that number. A metadata solution is designed to be able to answer these basic questions about the net sales or net income number:
- What is the business definition for the data?
- What is the source system(s) for the data?
- What calculations have been included in determining the data?
- What department(s) owns the data?
- Who is the correct contact if you have questions about the data?
- What other departments use the data?
- How current is the data?
- What are the business validation rules used to verify the data?
- What type of reconciliation scheme is used to validate the data?
- Have there been any adjustments to the data outside of the source system(s)?
These are simple legitimate questions that can be answered by a comprehensive metadata solution. But because metadata is frequently “stove-piped” throughout the organization, it is usually not readily available across the customer’s technology infrastructure. This is a pervasive problem encountered in many technology operations. Developers have not considered lineage in their design. Packaged application systems present significant metadata silos. To provide true lineage reporting, it is necessary to combine business, technical and operational metadata.
Many organizations contact MetaGovernance to discuss different types of metadata tools, or to request assistance in selecting the correct tool for their needs. While there are several metadata tools on the marketplace, currently they focus only on technical metadata and they are not extensible. Technologists focus on technical metadata. Unfortunately technical metadata is but a small subset of what is needed to answer the list of questions above. The true business value comes in the combination of business, technical, and operational metadata. Instead of recommending that organizations buy metadata tools that usually fail to achieve business expectations, MetaGovernance will attempt to design solutions using an organization’s existing tools to build a metadata solution. The power of Business Intelligence applications is that they are able to incorporate data from multiple sources and at multiple levels of details or granularity, all of which are available within the umbrella of an integrated reporting layer. When you stop and think about it, why would a metadata solution be any different? MetaGovernance can provide the design and implementation strategy for a metadata warehouse that can probably be built using your existing technology. Contact us to find out how.
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