Metadata Management Software

It is a crucial task for companies to properly manage and maintain their metadata repositories in order to make better data-informed business decisions and avoid regulatory penalties.

Metadata management software can help businesses organize created and collected data to facilitate easy accessibility, integration, and analysis of metadata. Without a reliable metadata management solution, your metadata repository may fall victim to critical errors that not only affect decision-making but also decrease the productivity of your IT team.

Here’s what we'll cover:

• What is metadata management software?
• Common features of metadata management software
• What type of buyer are you?
• Benefits of metadata management software
• Key considerations for purchasing metadata management software
• Market trends to understand

What is metadata management software?

Metadata management software improves companies’ metadata maintenance and administration processes by providing a centralized repository for metadata. These platforms also decrease the complexity of metadata file keeping, allowing IT teams to efficiently collect, access, and analyze their metadata.

Metadata management solutions are also able to identify key characteristics of recorded data, such as data type, size, storage location, version, and connection. These features prove useful when seeking to ensure that governance and compliance standards are met.

Common features of metadata management software

While features vary from product to product, metadata management software typically offers some or all of the following functionality:

What type of buyer are you?

• Public relations firms and entertainment companies: Public relations firms and entertainment companies mainly operate in a digital landscape. Metadata provides these companies with key SEO insights that helps businesses effectively structure their content for their target audience, ultimately impacting the content these businesses produce. This is why it is essential for public relations firms and entertainment companies to automate metadata collection workflows. These buyers should choose a metadata management solution that enables the detailed organization and analysis of metadata to streamline the content procurement process.
• Financial and healthcare organizations: Companies that operate within the financial and healthcare industries are constantly coming in contact with sensitive data. For data compliance reasons, this data must be stored, cataloged, and analyzed carefully. These organizations should choose metadata management software that puts emphasis on governance to ensure their data consistently meets all regulatory requirements.
• Insurance agencies: For these buyers, itʻs crucial to obtain a metadata management solution that validates all metadata stored in their repository. Data quality control is an important factor in ensuring that insurance professionals can make good, data-informed decisions about which customers to insure, how much to charge customers, and other daily considerations. These buyers should choose a metadata management solution that effectively tracks errors in the data repository and makes necessary corrections.

Benefits of metadata management software

• Enhances data quality: In order to maintain data quality, companies must quickly identify and rectify all potential data inconsistencies in their repository. Metadata management software improves the overall quality of an organizationʻs metadata repository by automating the processing of all data issues in real time.
• Encourages regulatory compliance: Metadata must be accurately collected and classified to effectively complete regulatory compliance audits. If a company’s metadata is incorrectly cataloged, there may be legal and financial consequences. Metadata management software flags sensitive data for easy identification, ensuring regulatory compliance.
• Accelerates project delivery speed: Today, it's crucial for a company to possess accurate metadata since metadata fuels most companies’ marketing initiatives. Metadata management software automates the metadata collection and analysis process, increasing the accuracy of an organization’s database, therefore accelerating the deployment of projects.

Key considerations for purchasing metadata management software

Here are a few factors to consider when purchasing metadata management software:

• Data visualization options: Knowledge graphs, mind maps, and other data visualization tools can help businesses better understand and visualize their metadata landscape. Be sure to choose a metadata management software solution that features data visualization tools so that your IT team is able to make data-informed decisions faster.
• Technical support: Although metadata management software helps automate metadata collection, catalytic, and analyzation processes, you must still consider the needs of your IT team. If your metadata management software happens to malfunction, will your IT team be able to receive the help it needs? Ask your software vendor if they offer 24/7 support to set your IT team up for success.
• Automated data harvesting options: It’s important to understand that not all metadata management solutions automate the harvesting of both data-at-rest and data-in-motion sources. When purchasing a metadata management platform for your organization, be sure to ask how in-depth your software solution of choice goes when gathering metadata.

Market trends to understand

Today, most metadata management platform vendors are invested in the expansion of analytics. Consider the following market trends when searching for a metadata management platform for your organization:

• Augmented analytics: Augmented analytics is a process that takes data from raw data sources and analyzes and reports it using natural language processing. This reporting technique makes understanding data reporting easier for employees that do not come from an information technology background. Augmented analytics eliminates the need for IT professionals to interpret the findings of machine learning.
• Cloud analytics: Cloud analytics is an alternative to on-premise analytics. Much like the name suggests, cloud analytics stores and analyzes data in the cloud. This type of data analytics is much more scalable, which is optimal for growing businesses. Cloud analytics algorithms are applied to large databases to efficiently identify patterns and offer future predictions at a fraction of the cost of on-premise analytic solutions.