Metadata is key to understanding the data at hand, whether you’re a company’s COO or a lower-level employee. Defined most simply as “data about data,“ metadata provides the context necessary to know what a piece of data is and how it can best be used to grow or strengthen a company. Your Spotify library might the most accessible metaphor for metadata—when you log into your account, you see your song and can sort them by artist, album, other details.
Consider if, instead, you opened Spotify to a slew of songs without this identifying information. It might be a long list of numbers labeling each audio file, or there might be a title, but no additional information. If you’re searching for a particular song, how will you start? If you have titles, at least, you might be able to narrow it down—but how many songs share the same title, even if they’re entirely different? Without even having a title, your music library becomes almost unusable.
In the case of a song, the metadata associated with a song includes its album, artist, genre, release date, album cover, and other such details. These factors make it obvious what a particular song is—when you want to listen to Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You,” you won’t have to sort through thousands of unknown songs (or pieces of data) to do so.
Metadata Management
From that basic understanding of metadata, you may be wondering what is metadata management? Essentially, metadata management is rather self-explanatory—it’s the process of managing metadata. Like metadata itself provides meaning, metadata management provides the organization and usability that metadata needs.
Continuing the comparison to Spotify, metadata management is like the app’s ability to filter songs by artist or album, or even curate them in playlists. If someone else opened your music library, they’d be able to see what you listen to at a glance. Similarly, a consistent metadata management strategy allows a variety of business users to utilize the metadata available, regardless of who created that metadata.
To implement a metadata management system, many companies turn to software like those offered by TIBCO to ensure their metadata can be used to the fullest extent. With the right metadata management tool, an organization can develop a solid data governance plan from the smallest detail on up.
Is metadata management necessary?
Simply put, yes! Without metadata management, an organization will have little to no way to use the metadata available to them. They could sort through individual files hoping to find a detail that serves a certain purpose—or they could use their company’s consistent metadata management system to find the information they need in an instant.
How does effective metadata management impact a company?
Yes, metadata management is necessary to utilize metadata, but why do you need to use it at all? In the modern world, and a business context in particular, data (and subsequent metadata) is accumulating at unprecedented rates.
Whenever a user visits a company’s website to browse, that site collects data. If they purchase, that’s additional data. With each piece of data and its metadata, an organization will gather invaluable information about their customers, offering insight into how they can improve the different systems and workflows they use throughout the company.
Metadata management strategies allow a business to take advantage of the available metadata and the data it describes. Without a consistent, company-wide system to manage this information, the metadata would remain in a state of unorganized, unusable chaos.
To take advantage of metadata and the insights it provides, each member of a business team must be able to understand and implement those insights. With a metadata management system, those insights become accessible and organized, making sure the business can take advantage of that competitive edge.
