How to leverage active metadata: where to start

This article is the first in a two-part series that highlights the various sources in which your organization is already storing and pulling metadata from. The second article in the series helps organizations understand the difference between active and passive metadata, as well as how to begin utilizing active metadata to unlock immediate business impacts. Step one is understanding where to access your metadata today.

While metadata and tagging are known to be key components to discovering the necessary data in your organization’s data lake, metadata investment is often predicated on the idea that the work put in to organize and catalog it now will become useful for future endeavors. While accurate, organizations should begin to consider the potential business value their metadata can provide when used actively for immediate impacts as opposed to simply documenting and maintaining it for potential future use.

Where is your metadata today?

Modern organizations already have an overabundance of metadata stored and pulled from a variety of sources, much more than they may realize. When working towards trying to actively utilize metadata for immediate impact, it’s important to consider the following sources:

Master data management tools

Master data management plays a critical role in overarching data governance efforts. This includes all technologies, tools and systems that ensure data align across your entire organization. The metadata available within master data management platforms are your master records, including all the fields within them that create the building blocks of your organization, defining your primary main data domains. Along with master data management platforms, there is also important metadata stored in your operational applications, such as your enterprise resource planning application (ERP) and customer relationship management application (CRM). Data stewards need to think upstream when considering metadata sources to utilize for active impacts.

Databases and data lakes

Databases and data lakes are well known sources where organizational data is being stored and can often be easy places to also access metadata. Many industry standard database platforms have metadata tools built in that require little overhead work from your organization’s IT department to gain access to your metadata. Tools such as Microsoft Purview, within