Metadata Management
Leveraging Metadata to Document Your Data Processing Systems is what Managing Metadata is All About. The process of gathering and metadata can also be simply described as cataloging. Metadata is used to describe and provide the knowledge necessary to manage, maintain, and enhance our technology environments. Metadata is any information that describes the data managed by an organization and the processes that affect that data.
Metadata Management Building Blocks
Why Leverage and Manage Metadata?
Most data exists in many different databases, systems and even formats. For example, some data may be on the mainframe, while other information could be in SQL databases and yet other sources will be in the form of various flat file systems or source code that affects the data, spreadsheets, and desktop databases.
Business users find it difficult to query the complex data. Writing reports against the data usually requires time consuming and expensive resources. In most cases the reports do not even answer the real questions managers ask.
Managers want to see the global picture. They want to have the ability to ensure that policies are being enforced and service level agreements are being met in regards to the data.
We Need to Consolidate and Understand the Islands of Information in Our Company!
In an effort to fulfill business user’s needs, technology departments spend countless man-hours sourcing, mapping and sifting through the reams of code and processes that load and manipulate data. They may also be involved with building an enterprise data warehouse solution, master data, governance effort, or maybe, simply getting “some perspective of the data”.
- Migrations from one system to another.
- Cooking data for reporting.
- Restructuring data to make it more useful.
- Master Data Management.
- Data Governance.
Metadata Management Can Benefits
- Allow business users to navigate, find and analyze information.
- Protect the knowledge in your organization.
- Reduce project analysis time.
- Determine the impact of making system changes.
- Capture metadata from legacy systems having little or no documentation.
- Automatically provide documentation to other business units.
Did you know?
That metadata not only applies to data in an organization but can also be descriptive of processes, code, configurations, including business metadata, which describes business and governance terminology. Metadata is used to describe and provide the knowledge necessary to manage, maintain, and enhance our technology environments.
Types of Metadata
There are many types of metadata, but the three most widely classified kinds are business metadata, technical metadata and semantics metadata.
Technical Metadata
Technical metadata describes technical systems, tools and usually is extracted using some form of adapter. Technical Metadata supports developers and technical personnel in linking tools, applications and process documentation together to provide search-ability when supporting and I.T. applications, processes and tools. Technical metadata describes the technical systems it represents such as:
- Data Dictionaries
- Source Code
- Process Flow Descriptions.
- ETL Mappings.
Business Metadata
Business metadata is key to providing a global perspective to the metadata and allows all business users to drill through to the level of detail they require. It delivers more than just technical descriptions, but presents information that is useful to the business. Business metadata describes technical computer data, business rules, applications and processes in a way that is understandable to the business users. Business metadata hides technological constraints by mapping business language to the technical systems. Business metadata describes the technical systems it represents such as:
- Business Terms.
- Business Rules.
- Calculations.
- Key Performance Indicators.
- Data Quality Metric.
- Data Governance Rules or Policies
Semantic Metadata
Finally, semantic metadata is more or less the synonyms, antonyms, and alias information. Which when collected and managed provides a value add to the metadata. Semantic metadata ensures the technical and business users are relying on a common business meaning, regardless of how it is represented or referred to. This reduces the all too frequent communications gap that exists within large organizations between I.T. and the business, by promoting the use of metadata, which is consistent for each of the parties and also correlated to one another. Semantic metadata describes the technical systems it represents such as:
- Data fields are named the same but have a different meaning.
- Data fields are named differently but mean the same thing.
- Data fields have many names and many meanings.
Key Requirements of a Metadata Tool Solution
What is truly needed is a repository like a card catalog in a library through which business users, project managers and technical people can look up, by subject, the elements of information, view descriptions and see what processes actually load and manipulate their data. SMM is the leading metadata repository and portal solution for capturing, managing and publishing metadata across the enterprise. ShaGha Data; reduces integration and management costs by providing a "card catalog" style metadata registry system which manages information assets, mappings and semantics relating to hardware, software, processes and data. We solve the key problem of sharing accurate knowledge about data, business rules, and the complex processes that affect your data.
SMM Key Features:
- A central, vendor neutral, repository to store the metadata.
- Powerful tools to discover as much metadata as possible automatically.
- Not cost prohibitive.
- Provides immediate value.
- Provides a search engine.
- Ability to perform impact analysis.
- Simple automated maintenance and scalability.
- Allows you to manage business metadata.
- Provides a historical perspective with comparison features.
Answers these Questions
- What you have.
- What the meanings are.
- Where it is located.
- Show what created it.
- Show how to retrieve it.
SMM captures and manages all types of metadata from one or more metadata repositories, Where it can then be published using our portals or to other third party tools via simple queries as well as web services in the cloud.
Metadata Management Key Benefits
We need the ability of seeing documentation showing the interrelationships between the different parts of the systems we maintain, regardless of the complexities within. Leverage your current knowledge base and provide all users the same picture of your infrastructure resulting in groups actively working more closely together, designing better architectures, providing faster support responses and achieving significantly more uptime across the board. With a typical tool deployment time of less than two days your company can start using the product right now; through an interface you'll be immediately familiar with.
Senior Managers
- Ensure service level agreements are being met.
- Manage data governance policies and controls.
- Provides the linkage between the business need or desire (policy) and the information or data value.
- Transfer the knowledge that is held by key employees into your metadata repository and make it available to everyone, reducing the cost of lost time from employee turnover.
- Minimize cost over-runs on new projects.
- Train new employees to support current technical systems in half the time.
Data Stewards
- Creating and documenting the data definitions for the subject area’s entities and attributes.
- Identifying the business and architectural relationships between objects.
- Certifying the accuracy, completeness and timeliness of the content.
- Establishing and documenting the context of the content (data heritage and lineage).
- Providing a range of contextual understanding for an increasingly diverse range of data users, including trusted data for compliance, internal controls, and better decision-making.
- Providing some of the information a technology professional might need for the physical implementation.
Data Personnel
- Perform Impact Analysis.
- Manage your data dictionaries and related database documentation.
- Improve data quality
- Provide data governance metadata
- Improve overall data stewardship
IT Personnel
- Find documentation to do daily jobs.
- Capture documentation within a repository.
- Provide accurate answers which would usually require extensive research.
Project Managers
- Better scope projects by utilizing powerful impact analysis capabilities.
- Manage project documentation.
- Search and view technical systems to get documentation in an easy understandable format.
Business Users
- Provides the Metadata for utilizing powerful business intelligence applications.
- Manage project documentation.
- Add business descriptions to metadata to extend and leverage your information assets.
- Provide documentation automatically to other business units.
