Business Intelligence (BI) Metadata Management

Metadata management is a critical but often ignored component to implementing successful business intelligence. It is a path to establishing common understanding between the business and IT, but not often well understood by either side of the organization.

Gartner considers metadata management as “arguably the most important of the 12 capabilities” they assess for the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms.

Most BI platforms capture adequate technical metadata, but few offer a unified catalog of business metadata. Without this capability, here's what you're missing:

• A unified corporate glossary that creates a common and unambiguous understanding of business terminology
• A data dictionary that provides a catalog of your data warehouse
• The ability to integrate your metadata within your reports, analytical tools and business applications — allowing end-users to benefit from clarity
• Transparent visibility into relevant technical metadata (job status, last time processed, etc.)

The problems that result from a lack of metadata strategy are not obvious, but their results are no less costly. Recognizing that common problems related to your business intelligence solution are actually related to metadata management is a key first step.

Common symptoms related to mismanaged metadata are:

• Confusion over business rules and corporate terminology
• Inconsistent definition of data warehouse terminology between IT and business, or within/between business groups
• Lack of trust in data warehouse due to lack of understanding business rules
• No governance process to manage data dictionary terms
• Longer project timelines resulting from need to research information that should already be available
• No central, published corporate glossary/ data dictionary
• Projects are difficult to estimate because it is not known what is already available
• Lack of visibility into quality, latency and timeliness of data
• Technical metadata not tied to data warehouse metrics and visible to users
• Difficult to tell what is available in the data warehouse, especially for new users
• No central, published corporate glossary/ data dictionary

Being keenly aware of the value of effective metadata management, Tallan has made it a key part of our business intelligence services offering.