Home > Blogs > Categories

Master Data Management

Avoiding Metadata Chaos, Part 2: Integrating Enterprise Metadata and Taxonomies
Submited by johnh on
December 15, 2011 - 10:56 GMT

This is a continuation of last month's post: What You Need to Know to End Information Chaos.

Business makes extensive use of taxonomy and metadata in a variety of scenarios including accounting, databases and inter/intra-net based applications to provide structure and organize information.  All this is normal and straightforward.  Chaos arises, however, when a business manager or executive asks questions that cut-across systems.  When, for example, they want to be able to integrate engineering data, customer-oriented product information, customer information, and customer service complaints to identify new product-lines and solution opportunities. 

To achieve the goal of visualizing a business problem by mining information repositories in a creative way to address complex issues involving multiple data repositories, taxonomies and metadata must be aligned to establish a comprehensive "single source of truth."  The concept of a single source of truth is the mantra in the drive to put Master Data Management (MDM) into practice.  However, the effort comes with certain practical and serious challenges.  The most significant being the fact that different and well-governed information systems have different semantics and different metadata standards.  Achieving semantic interoperability is a serious challenge, especially as business systems and network service architectures develop to meet organizational needs to adapt to a rapidly changing technology environment.

So what to do?  How do organizations find ways to capture, manage, and derive understanding from a wide range of sources including its internal expertise resources and the stream of information provided by social media channels?

Avoiding Metadata Chaos, Part 2: Integrating Enterprise Metadata and Taxonomies
Submited by johnh on
December 15, 2011 - 10:56 GMT

This is a continuation of last month's post: What You Need to Know to End Information Chaos.

Business makes extensive use of taxonomy and metadata in a variety of scenarios including accounting, databases and inter/intra-net based applications to provide structure and organize information.  All this is normal and straightforward.  Chaos arises, however, when a business manager or executive asks questions that cut-across systems.  When, for example, they want to be able to integrate engineering data, customer-oriented product information, customer information, and customer service complaints to identify new product-lines and solution opportunities. 

To achieve the goal of visualizing a business problem by mining information repositories in a creative way to address complex issues involving multiple data repositories, taxonomies and metadata must be aligned to establish a comprehensive "single source of truth."  The concept of a single source of truth is the mantra in the drive to put Master Data Management (MDM) into practice.  However, the effort comes with certain practical and serious challenges.  The most significant being the fact that different and well-governed information systems have different semantics and different metadata standards.  Achieving semantic interoperability is a serious challenge, especially as business systems and network service architectures develop to meet organizational needs to adapt to a rapidly changing technology environment.

So what to do?  How do organizations find ways to capture, manage, and derive understanding from a wide range of sources including its internal expertise resources and the stream of information provided by social media channels?

What You Need to Know to End Information Chaos
Submited by heffernan on
November 15, 2011 - 8:50 GMT

Part 1: Metadata governance, standards, and maturity

Clients I work with struggle with many issues.  Among these, two often rise to the top.

  1. How do we show the impact of metadata on our business?
  2. 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.

Why Taxonomy is Critical to Master Data Management (MDM)
Submited by searley on
August 01, 2011 - 11:28 GMT

Organizations are paying more and more attention to Master Data Management (MDM). MDM comprises a set of processes and tools that consistently defines and manages the non-transactional data entities of an organization .  According to Gartner, two-thirds of Fortune 1000 organizations will have deployed 2 or more MDM solutions by 2014.

MDM promises not just greater control over consistent reference data; but an ability to manage the relations between data entities in order to generate more effective business knowledge. From this perspective,  MDM requires an understanding and agreement about the meaning of terminology.   Hence, the natural role of taxonomy.

Experiencing Information Overload? Just wait...
Submited by searley on
July 11, 2011 - 12:35 GMT

"You ain't seen nothin' yet." So says an IDC report on the growth of information.  The statistics cited by IDC included voice, radio, print and TV as they transition to digital formats. The number? 35 trillion gigabytes. That's 35 exabytes. An Exabyte being one thousand billion billion. But, how much, exactly, is 'too much' information? Is there really such a thing?

Consider that back in the 16th century, around the time when the printing press was invented, the world was undergoing an information explosion. People wondered, how could anyone possibly read all of those books? It was quickly determined that we didn't need to read all the books and what was needed was simply an index of all the available books. This evolved into today's library system where all books are accessible--if and when needed.

This so-called "information overload" problem will be solved in the same way - by creating lists, classification structures, bibliographies, reference materials and all sorts of dynamic, curated content. The best web sites have the capability of anticipating what users need and assembling that content dynamically - something we refer to as Content Choreography™ - the ability to coordinate, weave and present content into new information products and services based on the needs of a diverse set of users all operating on the site at the same time. And of course, to combine, curate, and choreograph content effectively requires metadata, taxonomies, consistent organizing principles tuned to audience, task and problem.