The world of data is offering dozens of exciting opportunities for the way that companies operate, and will likely continue to upend the world of business as data tools continue to evolve. Of course, if you can’t ensure that your data quality is impeccable, the analytics and insights that you discern from your data sources are less likely to have the right impact on your company. If you want your business users to get the most out of using various data models in their workflows, it’s important to understand and properly utilize metadata in your work.
Data has to be organized somehow. Metadata is data that describes data and allows you to better search, categorize, and analyze your repository of data assets. Having this kind of classification ultimately makes your data more useful, since metadata offers a way to illuminate connections, relationships, and correlations between different data points. Especially when it comes to data governance, having a robust metadata repository means that you can catalog and analyze data as is necessary for your work. Learn more about how to best implement metadata management solutions below.
How Can You Leverage Analytical Metadata?
When it comes to metadata management, tagging and categorizing your data is especially impactful in the world of analytics. From leveraging business metadata or technical metadata for impact analysis or just general reporting, ensuring that your data catalog is easily navigated is critical if you want to ensure that you’re making the most of big data in your analysis. Using metadata, you can better understand what kinds of data make the most sense for you to analyze in your job. For example, a business context for one stakeholder may be different than what an IT professional is looking for about server uptime and downtime. As such, metadata can help get the right information in the hands of the right people at the right time.
How Can You Utilize Operational Metadata?
Operational data is different than analytical data in that you’re often focusing more on data lineage in these kinds of use cases. When it comes to operational metadata, you’re generally looking at improving your business processes by taking a good look at your data. Having proper data management practices can ensure that the metadata you’re using is helping you to find the right data for each step in the process. This ultimately leads to a deeper understanding of which systems and metadata assets are required for any singular business process, such as an acquisition campaign or handling an order made on your e-commerce platform.
How Can Metadata Help With Compliance?
Depending on the source data and information assets you store, it’s important that you follow proper business rules and data management processes as a part of the administration of data. This is especially true when it comes to regulatory compliance around the collection of data (such as the GDPR guidelines for cookies on websites) or how you store and access sensitive data surrounding credit card information, social security numbers, or medical information. When you use enterprise metadata management (or really any metadata management tool), you can tag these different data points with tags and other keywords that let other users know that proper compliance protocol needs to be utilized in relation to these data assets. As such, you can come up with new business rules and best practices surrounding how you use metadata management solutions throughout your company.
In order to fully embrace the data movement, it’s important to understand which attributes you need from any point in your data inventory. In order to best focus your company on digital transformation, using different schema and metadata management tools can ensure that you’re using data appropriately and powerfully.
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