Part 1: Metadata governance, standards, and maturity
Clients I work with struggle with many issues. Among these, two often rise to the top.
- How do we show the impact of metadata on our business?
- Do we need our own metadata standard? Alternatively, should we use industry standards?
This blog covers my approach to answering these questions.
To begin with, I ask them how they define metadata. And most often, they give me the usual tautology: metadata is data about data. You can do better than that! A more meaningful alternative is to say that metadata is what allows data to be searched, understood, and consistently used within a company.
Metadata provides data with a context that enables users to think about and share data in useful ways. In short, metadata transforms data into information. It enables a complex organization to make informed decisions and take appropriate actions because we can look at our collective experience through a common framework of understanding.

The intellectual endeavor of managing "metadata" is at the core of all information and knowledge related work. Taxonomy is dedicated to the practice of producing logical categorization models, and therefore at the very heart of creating metadata systems. Human-understandable taxonomies provide the words and relationships needed to access and use information.