Organisations face a number of pressures where data quality, and metadata comprehension can, we believe, not only address the immediate objective but provide added value and de-risking opportunities:
- if you’re planning to extract & preserve legacy data, you will need the data lineage, provenance and meaningful metadata to preserve the data value and promote future usability;
- if you’re planning a data migration, then it makes sense to understand and vary your current data dictionaries according to the new cloud constraints, regulatory and contextual requirements – including a hierarchical, consistent enterprise ontology with term standardisation;
- even if you have no immediate plans, what about the risk of lock in? It still makes sense to make sure you have a thoroughgoing programme of data curation to take account of the data lifecycle, sustainable data quality and the ability to function safely within an ecosystem. It also happens that this is a good way to also delimit the risk of lock-in by applications or future clouds. Your data is your business and you will want to make sure it is portable and retains value and usability beyond its current host application or cloud;
- if you already have quality data, then the next step should be to appraise and improve your organisational semantics in order to comprehensively structure and ensure you have quality metadata. The metadata stucture has to be hierarchichal and adapt as requirements change so that by the time you come to code, you have an information architecture that is capable of being programmed. And in the event of any strategic IT changes, your data and metadata are resilient to that adaptation – in fact, in some ways the metadata is more important since without the metadata, the data itself will not be understood and therefore will have little or no value. So don’t wait till a project is thrust upon you, invest in your metadata now!
In particular, if you have ERP systems without data models or without sight of what is in the tables, then please talk to Incorvus – we provide and advise on the use of Safyr for metadata discovery, easily, quickly and accurately.