Metadata Management: Challenges, its Democratization and Governance

 With digital transformation overtaking almost every aspect of businesses, data has found itself at the very core of the entire process. In-depth and detailed analysis and understanding of data are what’s determining the success of organizations, nowadays. The better a business is at evaluating and driving insights from collected data, the better they will be at revamping their strategies and boosting their overall growth.

Over the past couple of years, data and its analysis has seen tremendous growth, especially with the arrival of Big Data and the various regulations, data analysts and leaders are looking beyond conventional trends.

Up until now data was just brought in for reporting, data warehouses, and data marts, but today it is cloud-native and cloud-first; the focus has shifted on delivering trusted data for better insights which brought the concept of metadata and its management. In fact, according to Gartner, “By 2021, enterprises are projected to spend twice as much effort in metadata management as compared with 2018.”

What is Metadata Management?

In simple words, metadata is the data that contextualizes data. It’s more like “labeling data” to facilitate the organization, classification, and, ultimately, to understand data. By providing insights into the who, what, where, when, and why of your data it facilitates the disclosure and understanding of data so that the data leaders can eventually derive essential information required to enable advanced analytics. Without metadata, organizations can find it hard to trust your data’s context and also manage the huge amounts of diverse data collected.

To address the aforementioned issues, a robust metadata management strategy is necessary which requires transparent processes and authentic data gathering sources. Metadata management not only encourages democratized data but also gives way to data governance in order to authenticate the validity and reliability of data. 

Challenges of Metadata Management

Metadata management describes all the aspects of an organizations’ information assets and enables it to effectively manage and use these assets. It drives the precision of reports, upholds the data transformation alongside ensuring the accuracy of all the calculations involved in the entire process.

But with all these fancy uses come with challenges, some of which are listed below:

• Since metadata is all over an organization in the form of databases and spreadsheets, assembling it might become a head-scratcher and highly vulnerable to errors

• Metadata present in text files or multimedia will need a proper definition to ensure its usability

• Additionally, there aren’t any standards of data collection out there

To implement metadata management within an organization, it’s important to evaluate the regulations associated with data risks, especially democratized data, and at the same time balance it with the identified business needs. This focus on reliable democratized data for reliable insights that will help organizations make business-altering decisions can be resolved by data democratization and data governance. In fact, these 2 concepts are at the very core of metadata management.

Metadata Management & Data Governance

Data governance provides tangible answers to exactly what acceptable data is, what constitutes metadata, its source, and usage, its accuracy, rules it should follow, and who all are involved in a data lifecycle?

Since metadata management involves different teams and levels within an organization, to ensure its integrity and reliability data cross-references are vital, which again points out the need for proper collaboration between teams and roles in order to complete metadata which in turn will establish effective and easy data governance.

Metadata Management & Data Democratization

Nurturing a data-driven culture within an organization is vital for data democratization as it empowers and enables non-specialists to collect and analyze data without expert help. This, also, is a collective effort and can’t happen in isolation but involves people and processes to leverage insights and make key business decisions.

But there are bottlenecks too, what if the source isn’t reliable? What if the authenticity of the democratized data can’t be validated? and so on and as great as it may sound “data accessibility at all levels whenever they need”, but you need to maintain the trueness of the metadata. Although you’re free to choose whether you intend to take a liberal approach with the “access for all” notion or a more conservative approach that will limit access to the metadata and the type of metadata they can access.

It’s also critical that organizations have a robust data governance strategy in place, beforehand, to ensure that data accuracy, reliability, and security, alongside supporting all end-users with the resources they need to leverage the data. In fact, for a healthy data democratization ecosystem to flourish you need a strong data governance strategy to protect people from making flawed business decisions.

The era of data democratization requires trust which can be achieved only through governed data democratization by incorporating necessary privacy policies to ensure that as an organization you maintain customer trust alongside complying with both external regulatory mandates. As an organization, you need to implement a rock-solid data governance plan to weed out inefficiencies (if any) and encourage accountability within teams.