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The quantity of data that the average IT shop has to manage is exploding, and metadata (data about data) is becoming increasingly more important. The first metadata repositories were not much more than data dictionaries, but now metadata is considered to include more than just data definitions. Metadata repositories often hold data about the IT environment, applications, processes, and hardware as well as formal data about the structure of the business, such as business process models and business vocabularies.
Many Global 100 enterprises today have IT budgets approaching or exceeding $1bn. An organization of this size and complexity requires its own management processes. The ability to catalogue IT assets and the relationships between them makes the metadata repository a key resource in the modern enterprise IT shop.
Yet many companies have been disappointed by their metadata efforts, or have postponed the deployment of a repository for lack of a clear return on investment. Why would any IT organization hesitate to invest in such a fundamental management resource?
The answer is that traditional repositories fall short of providing tangible value, and fall far short of a full solution to the fundamental issue of IT management – the quest for an efficient integrated and adaptable computing environment.
Certainly, cataloguing IT assets is an important start. However, the real solution requires IT to understand its assets. Only a full understanding will ensure that assets are used and reused appropriately. Furthermore, only a full and formal understanding can provide a basis for automating the integration of resources and for supporting change with automatic impact analysis.
The future therefore belongs to semantic enterprise repositories. These will capture traditional metadata, but will also capture the precise meaning and role of those assets. Of course, they will use this semantics to provide services such as automatic data translation and automated impact analysis.
In the future, the marriage of metadata and semantics will be at the heart of more efficient more flexible IT environments supporting more efficient more flexible enterprises.
Zvi Schreiber is CEO of Unicorn™.
Unicorn leverages a semantic metadata approach to deliver the world's leading
data management system, supporting the core mission of the information architecture
organizations of the Global 1000. The Unicorn system™ provides a seamless
business view by relating disparate data formats and interfaces to an agreed-upon
model of the business. This semantic understanding is leveraged to automate
tasks of data management, data integration and data quality. Unicorn's customers
achieve a higher quality of information, realize business changes in real-time
and substantially lower IT costs. Unicorn is headquartered in New York City
and can be found at www.unicorn.com.