Enterprise Architecture Must Lead Enterprise Metadata Management Strategies

IT organizations already recognize metadata management as crucial for structured data quality but increasingly look to leverage metadata to improve the quality of business and IT processes. Despite this growing realization of metadata's potential, most organizations' definition of metadata strategy remains nascent, primarily addressing data modeling consistency, IT developer efficiencies, and business glossary creation. But metadata is becoming more pervasive. Every corner of an organization's information systems captures and maintains metadata: process models, business rules, content classification, service-oriented architecture (SOA) policies, and application rights — to name only a few. This far surpasses the scope of the traditional metadata definition: "data about data." The next wave of IT evolution, Smart Computing, will cause the importance of managing metadata to explode. Metadata management is by nature pervasive within the organization; therefore, EA must take the lead in defining a broader metadata strategy.