I was recently facilitating a business intelligence vision and strategy session for a client when we came to the topic of metadata.  Their Enterprise Data Warehouse Group had recently conducted an internal study on the value of their metadata.  Their conclusion was their data sourcing work took one-eighth the time when they had good metadata to work with.  Now that’s value!  And, that’s just the value to the IT development team.  There is even more value that same metadata provides to the business community.

The most commonly used definition for metadata is “data about other data”.  If it is true that data has value as an enterprise asset, wouldn’t data about that enterprise asset (aka. metadata) have even greater value?  Unfortunately, metadata is often looked at similar to documentation.  People often perceive metadata in the following ways:

• It’s outdated as soon as its done,

• It’s always the last thing to get done on the tail-end of a project,

• If the project budget is running low or even reduced before the project starts, metadata is an easy target for cutting costs and timeline,

• It has no real value, and

• Nobody has the time or the interest in creating it.

As long as we see metadata as a project-end activity to document what has been done, the true value of metadata will not be realized.  When we begin seeing metadata has an critical activity integrated into the many facets of the project, we can begin to achieve real, quantifiable value. 

At the risk of over-simplifying a complex topic, our project approach incorporates three major categories of metadata:

• Business – metadata about the data and information available to business users

• Technical – metadata about the environment and processes implemented by IT

• Operational – metadata about the processing and operational aspects of the information system 

All of this metadata is intended to provide business users and the IT team with information and context about the data an organization has:  where it came from, how current it is, how accurate it is, how it was calculated, and so on.  If incorporated into the project lifecycle, metadata has the potential to make your IT team more efficient by deploying more information more quickly to the business.  Metadata has the added potential to ensure your business users are interpreting the information in the correct context.

Would your CIO and CFO like to see IT projects completed with one-eighth the cost?  Would your executives appreciate receiving new information they requested in one-eighth the time?  Would your business users find value in spending one-eighth the amount of time trying to understand the information they are look at and its context?  Done right, metadata packs tremendous potential.