Establishing metadata and stewardship
We discussed information assets in the previous section; that is, identifying business and technical assets as two components that make up the information assets. Metadata is data about data. In our case, metadata is information that relates to the business assets and technical assets in an enterprise. Think of the last time you interacted with a bot or a search engine: you started by typing in keywords about your topic of interest and then thought of additional criteria to narrow down your search. Or, the search engine gave you faceted search options to filter out the noise from the information. The keywords you used – both the ones you started with and the recommendations based on faceted search – are metadata that describes the desired outcome.
Capturing metadata is an important and first step toward establishing a governance framework. It is important because it enhances the understanding we have about the enterprise information...
