Musings on Metadata and Compliance
Frank Dravis has a new post on metadata and its growing importance in the marketplace. Dravis wonders how metadata became a subject of interest for non-technical folk …
In years past, metadata was the domain of data architects. It helped them understand what data they had and how it related to the sources and operations from which it came and to which it went. At the first mention of metadata business users would roll their eyes and head for the conference room door. Surely metadata was the stuff of arcane IT discussions best had out of earshot of people driving and running the business.
Then metadata management progressed and someone had the silly idea of articulating the business value, the value to the business side of the house, for metadata. The value came from the resolution of an age old problem. A corporate manager is sitting in a conference room looking at their regular monthly sales report and it is different from what they expected based on anecdotal evidence from the field: the numbers are too low.
Personally, I think that this recent interest is driven by a few things:
- Regulation and the threat of real penalties for inaccuracies in reporting. People got interested enough to protect their own hides.
- The rise of ERP and BPM in the marketplace. If everything is in one place then metadata suddenly becomes a lot easier to manage.
Truthfully, I wonder how all of this is going to turn out. I know there are lots of people who want to sell metadata software, but in my experience it takes a lot of resource (time, effort, and expertise) to maintain a comprehensive metadata environment. The threat of jail time helps to keep people motivated enough to save their necks, but not enough to make something useful. Being locked into an ERP package can mean the same thing, only it is your data that is locked.
