Metadata Management Solutions
What is metadata?
Quite simply, metadata is data about data. It’s generated every time data is captured at a source, accessed by users, moved through an organization, integrated or augmented with other data from other sources, profiled, cleansed and analyzed. Metadata is valuable because it provides information about the attributes of data elements that can be used to guide strategic and operational decision-making.
It answers these important questions:
- What data do we have?
- Where did it come from?
- Where is it now?
- How has it changed since it was originally created or captured?
- Who is authorized to use it and how?
- Is it sensitive or are there any risks associated with it?
What is metadata management?
Why is metadata management challenging?
Creating and sustaining an enterprise-wide view of and easy access to underlying metadata is complicated for several reasons:
- The numerous data types and data sources that exist today weren’t designed to work together.
- Data infrastructures have been cobbled together over time with disparate technologies, poor documentation and little thought for downstream integration.
- Business context is limited or missing, and common terms haven’t been standardized and adopted across the enterprise.
- Policies, processes and tools that define and control data access by roles and across workflows are lacking.
- The traditional manual approach is expensive, time-consuming, error-prone and can’t keep pace with a dynamic enterprise data management infrastructure.
As a result, the applications and initiatives that depend on a solid data infrastructure may be compromised, rendering faulty analyses and insights. Without being able to take full advantage of analytics tools, an organization can’t become data-driven — or worse, it could end up going in the wrong direction.
Learn how metadata management supports enterprise intelligence according to IDC
Benefits of using erwin Data Intelligence by Quest for Metadata Management
Better data quality
Faster speed to insights
Regulatory compliance
Digital transformation
Enterprise collaboration
Greater productivity & reduced costs
Quicker project delivery
Why erwin for metadata management?
erwin Data Intelligence by Quest fuels both data management and data governance processes through an active metadata management approach driven by automation. It's unique in its ability to automatically harvest, transform and feed metadata from a wide array of data sources, operational processes, business applications and data models into a central data catalog and then make it accessible and understandable within the context of role-based views.
erwin Data Intelligence helps globally leading companies in a diverse range of industries get a better handle on the data within their organizations to better leverage and protect it. Within highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare and insurance, as well as in governmental agencies, its transparency, tracking and reporting capabilities are critical assets when tackling regulatory compliance.
erwin Data Intelligence offers a metamodel that is open, extensible and comes with a full set of APIs. A comprehensive list of standard data connectors are included for automated harvesting, refreshing and version-controlled metadata management. Optional erwin Smart Data Connectors by Quest reverse-engineer ETL code of all types and connect bi-directionally with reporting and other ecosystem tools. These connectors offer the fastest and most accurate path to data lineage, impact analysis and other detailed graphical relationships.
Additionally, erwin Data Intelligence provides integrated data quality capabilities leveraging data catalog metadata to initiate and automate data profiling and quality assessments, and providing widespread visibility of data quality scoring for IT, data governance teams and business users. Optional data observability and remediation tools also support data quality initiatives.
The metadata management capabilities of erwin Data Intelligence also serve as the foundation for data governance, data literacy and data marketplace capabilities within the software. With erwin, powerful automated metadata management and data catalog capabilities are your gateway into unlocking the full potential of data within your organization.
Lastly, erwin Data Intelligence is part of the erwin by Quest platform that also integrates data modeling, enterprise architecture and business process modeling. Customers rely on erwin's active metadata-driven approach to:
- Understand their business, technology and data architectures and the relationships between them
- Create and automate a curated enterprise data catalog, complete with physical assets, data models, data movement, data quality and on-demand lineage
- Activate their metadata to drive agile and well governed data preparation with integrated business glossaries and data dictionaries that provide business context for stakeholder data literacy