What is Metadata Management? 

Metadata management ensures data consistency, enabling better business decisions. It provides a single place for all users to access accurate definitions of information assets. While metadata can be used to enforce naming standards on new assets, it can also be used to identify and document redundancy and inconsistencies in your existing assets. This enables a consistent taxonomy across users, promoting more effective communication and better business decisions.

Metro InfoDesign - Metadata Management provides business value in all stages of data integration and warehousing projects, including design, development, deployment and management:

• Understand your Existing Data Environment - Metadata documents the location and nature of potential data sources, making it easy for developers to locate, understand, rationalize and use this data. It ensures that the right data is used and that you leverage all of your enterprise-wide assets including information from ERP, specialized and legacy systems. Metadata ensures that data is only rationalized once and is then made available to all subsequent projects needing access to the data, thereby saving considerable analysis time.



• Reduce Development Time and Improve Quality - Developers are provided with definitions of available source and target data, transformation rules and code values that can be used/reused in the mapping process, ensuring the consistency and accuracy of delivered information. As you scale your information stores to meet business needs, this documentation serves as a blueprint, dramatically decreasing your development cycle and associated costs. When future iterations of information stores need to be delivered, metadata management accounts for existing systems and creates a map to the new systems.



• Reduce Maintenance Time - Developers easily identify impacts of changes in an application or a data structure on data warehouses and their users. This significantly reduces the analysis time in the early stages of a project.



• Improve Support Response Time - Support staff can quickly respond to users' questions on the meaning of warehouse data and rapidly trace its origins. They can quickly understand all factors that may lead to questionable data values. They can also store their own documentation.



• Improve User Access to Information - Business users are provided with a web-based directory of warehouse information in business terms. Metadata management helps you understand what information you have, where it is located, and what value it provides to users. Users can view information in a context they understand, providing a more efficient and intuitive way to communicate.

MID Metadata management also streamlines the application development process. The key to success is getting to market quickly. Metadata reduces development, deployment and maintenance costs by helping manage the entire process and associated resources. Metadata provides a single source for logical, physical and process aspects of the application environment, while tracking versions of the code and documenting all aspects of the application development life cycle. By providing a complete, integrated view of the development environment, metadata helps identify redundant processes and applications, thereby reducing duplicated efforts. Developers can share and reuse existing objects such as data structures, programs, model definitions and more. In addition, enterprise impact analysis greatly reduces the analysis and maintenance phase of the development life cycle.

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