by Angela Guess
Ramon Barquin and Geoffrey Malafsky have written an article for BeyeNetwork regarding agile Data Governance and its power to harness enterprise Big Data. The article begins, “Data management has been a long time affection, addiction and affliction of ours because it is an essential factor in any decision support system. It was decision support that led us to data warehousing in the early 1990s and it soon became very clear that metadata – data about the data – was the critical layer that held the architecture together. The reason, of course, is because it is in the metadata – and the process models that include time, stakeholders and provide the greater business context – where one finds the rules and relationships that define how everything is supposed to work.”
It continues, “How can we tell the size and type of a data element? How do we know which specific version of a table is the most recent? How can we decide whether the value of a field is valid or not? Where do we find business definitions of data elements to clarify their actual meaning? How can we disambiguate between synonyms when we have several acceptable options? These are just some examples of the role of metadata and business context in a data warehousing environment. And every single instance points back to data governance.”
