Michael Blechar

I recently received a response to my blog entitled “Down With the Uber-Repository, Long Live Metadata!” criticizing my recommendation to not try to consolidate all your metadata into one “uber-repository”. Interestingly, while the respondent mentioned some success his company has had with that approach, he then went on to lament that the amount of metadata being managed in the repository was incomplete and that management did not appear to see the value in expanding its use to all the other metadata in the enterprise. And as a pragmatist, my response would be – good for them! Different business opportunities and threats ought to factor heavily into the decision of the how much rigor and breadth of scope you should apply to your data (and metadata) management.

I tend to find that there are two main issues which are incorrectly getting bundled together when Gartner clients want to address metadata management. And while they seem to want to make this mostly a technological decision, the fact is that it should be secondary to other issues. The first and more fundamental question needs to be “which metadata needs to be managed, and with what degree of rigor”. Metadata is pervasive in the organization – so managing all metadata is not a viable option. Like all other forms of data, there will be a subset of the metadata which is more critical to the organization. The most obvious example is the metadata about the subset of your information assets involving your data, processes, architectures, etc, which you consider to be “master data”.

In other words, as part of your enterprise information management strategy, you need to identify the master metadata and provide a more rigorous management strategy for it than other forms of metadata. And like all other forms of master data, there needs to be a business case in terms of governance, risk, compliancy, cost and opportunity for spending the extra resources to manage that master metadata (see "Mastering Master Data Management*").

Typically, an organization places top priority on improving the usability of its most valuable information assets (for example, customer, product and supplier data). Generally speaking, the more valuable the information asset, the more metadata there will be about it, and the more valuable the metadata will be. In other words, metadata is what unlocks the value of data and, therefore, requires management attention. The most valuable information assets ought to receive more management attention than those which are less valuable.

This is a related but different issue to the one concerning how to manage the metadata. As indicated in Gartner research note  “Applying Data Mart and Warehousing Concepts to Metadata Management*” there are many approaches to managing metadata ranging from leaving it uncoordinated in multiple places and tools, to consolidating subsets of it in metadata marts/warehouses for reporting purposes, to everything in between including bridges between metadata stores and real-time federation of metadata across stores. The key is applying the right approach to the right problem. While a single uber-repository for all metadata is not feasible, there will generally be a subset of metadata which needs to be managed in a robust manner – such as through physical consolidation or federation of master metadata for change impact (and other forms of) reporting.

Therefore, the take-away point here is that you ought to look at your master data management (and critical business process management and service-oriented architecture) efforts to identify which data is most important and make sure the ”master metadata” related to that information gets adequate attention – perhaps in terms of it being placed in a metadata mart/warehouse. Other metadata may best be managed using other approaches like bridging, federation, or simply looking in multiple places for metadata related to information assets. In the end, good metadata management involves evaluating risk, cost, opportunity and governance issues to make the right business decision on which metadata to spend the most resources managing, while also picking the most appropriate approach to meet those management needs – one size metadata management does not fit all!

*Available to Gartner clients or for a fee