by Angela Guess
Informatica recently put together a new white paper entitled Metadata Management for Holistic Data Governance. The executive summary reads, “The ultimate goal of any data governance initiative is to manage data for the purpose of delivering trustworthy, timely, and relevant information in support of informed business decisions. Data governance, then, is not about data, per se: ‘it is about the business processes, decisions, and stakeholder interactions that you want to enable.’ Once an enterprise establishes the making of informed business decisions as the collective aim of data governance, it becomes much easier to define clear goals and priorities for an initiative. Good data governance begins with specifying the company policies, people, and processes needed to launch that initiative. The focus then turns to the tools and technologies to implement and ensure compliance with data governance requirements.”
It continues, “Key to successful data governance is the management of metadata—the frame of reference giving data its context and meaning. Effectively governed metadata provides a view into the flow of data, the ability to perform an impact analysis, a common business vocabulary and accountability for its terms and definitions, and finally an audit trail for compliance. The management of metadata becomes an important capability enabling IT to oversee changes while delivering trusted, secure data in a complex data integration environment. Good metadata management tools, then, play a central role in holistic data governance.”
photo credit: Informatica