We’re going to be publishing a series of articles looking at the role of metadata plays in enterprise environments.

Metadata spans all aspects of an enterprise, acting not only as the glue between information but also at the heart of determining what is relevant to the end-user in a given scenario. As such, a holistic approach to metadata is needed to maximise your organisation’s chance of success.

We’re going to be looking in to typical challenges enterprises face:

• Ownership – who is responsible for and who manages the metadata
• Mobility – Making sure that knowledge captured in one area can be found and accessed easily in another
• Lifecycles – Metadata and business lifecycles and how to align them
• Technical – Some of the technical challenges in managing metadata

We’ll also be looking at metadata along some different dimensions. For example:

• Time-based – Enterprises typically work hard to establish a corporate taxonomy but that only caters for what has happened in the past. Consider organisations where new products and services are constantly being created. To maximise value, information must be shared quickly with the rest of the organisation. These “hot topics” won’t appear in any taxonomy. We’ll look at the complete metadata lifecycle from emergence through management to end of life.
• Structured / Unstructured – Metadata is really the glue between your structured and unstructured information. It’s easy to overlook the massive value that can be created by simply linking these two worlds together. For example, imagine you were engaged with a potential client who was a Tier 1 Investment Bank and wanted to find out all of the services and experts that I should be bringing to that conversation.
• Global / Local – Knowledge sharing in international organisations is complex but getting it right means much greater rewards. Whilst there needs to be consistency to allow for sharing across territories it’s important to allow countries to express what is important to them at a national level. For example, consider writing a proposal to support an international firm, how would you find case studies and experts across a multi-national, accessing local information classified in local language.

We’ll be walking through these challenges and considering the business, governance and technical challenges as we go.