Remember the film from 2002 Maid in Manhattan enjoyable romantic “Cinderella” fairy tale. The film production used several authentic New York City landmarks to create a realistic backdrop and one of its iconic locations was the climactic ballroom dance and the Temple of Dendur, a real exhibit within The Met) museum’s Sackler Wing. Later in 2008, I moved to New York city for work, and I have visited MET so many times and I am still planning to visit one more time. Because of its immense and ever-changing collection spanning 5,000 years of art and culture, and its world-class special exhibitions. I simply love MET.
Having gone through the grind of implementing Data Catalogs at multiple clients, I feel like I am setting up for The Museum of Metadata (TMM). Lot of leaders and executives sponsors these all sorts of Catalogs with an excitement but all it leads is to harvest and curate metadata that sits on the platform behind the fine glass. Just like how people simply scroll through museum galleries, these Catalog offers nothing than exhibitions. IT lauds for harvesting thousands and sometime millions of data assets and what not.
I wonder why these initiatives miserably fail in harnessing any value. Don’t you wonder about why these projects fail flat on return of investment, delivering almost no value to the business and enterprise. Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) is enormous and holds one of the world’s most extensive art collections, with more than 1.5 million objects spanning 5,000 years of history. Similarly, IT organizations hold high in setting up millions of data related assets, but the metadata simply sits there without any utility. Data Catalogs suffers issues like low user adoption and poor metadata quality. You are simply pulling out data dictionary names and some reporting structures and loading them on metadata management platforms, but this all stop short of doing what seems like the next natural step, helping enforce data policies, standards, classifying data with different taxonomies, mapped to different ownership and trustees.
By just searching and discovery the metadata without real understanding of data context is nothing but finding something without knowing what to do with one’s findings. Data catalogs without integration with data quality controls serve no purpose for the enterprise. Are you able to identify gaps in using data authoritative sources throughout data supply chain, document key transformations and computations, tracking data adjustments and data concern and exceptions go long way in harnessing value of metadata store. Data Catalogs can further help in prioritizing the effective management of critical data assets by tagging criticality to business processes, functions, data assets, data elements and so on. Can it help in driving reusability and trust within the stakeholder’s engagement programs? The entire premise of Museum of Metadata is discussed within the context of structured data. I didn’t even open the big can of unstructured data that represents 70% of organizational data.
My blog raises serious questions about the “why” side of Data Catalog and makes you think what makes a data catalog a good data catalog.
