infoTECH Feature

February 16, 2016

Getting More Out of Big Data by Leveraging Metadata

By Special Guest
Mika Javanainen, M-Files Corporation

Every business manager appreciates the need to capitalize on Big Data, and harnessing its power across various lines of business has become the Holy Grail for information technologists. As Big Data repositories continue to scale both in number and size, so does the game-changing potential for organizations to effectively tap into and manage them.

But Big Data by itself does not represent actionable business intelligence. In order to yield tangible outcomes, Big Data must be easily searched, retrieved, analyzed and consumed across the enterprise for a variety of applications – a process that can be highly streamlined and enhanced by using metadata.

Metadata are the attributes, properties and tags that describe and classify information. They may be represented in the form of virtually any and all distinguishing characteristics associated with the information asset (type of information asset, author, date created, workflow state, etc.). Once defined, metadata helps expose the value and purpose of the content, and it becomes an effective tool for organizing and quickly locating information. By leveraging metadata, users can quickly locate the right document, despite the vast amount of content residing within their repositories.

Metadata can help companies better leverage, manage and ultimately harness the vast information resources that typically reside in multiple systems in order to reach organizational goals. Simply put, a metadata-driven approach to enterprise information management can help organizations achieve high returns on their initiatives where fast access to precise content that resides in large and diverse Big Data repositories is of paramount importance.

A metadata-driven approach can help organizations extract greater value from their Big Data, while tackling the inherit challenges of data scale through:

  • Quick Access to the Right Information: A metadata-driven approach to information management helps to ensure workers can find the documents they're looking for instantly, with greater accuracy, and in a manner that is personalized and relevant to them. For example, using the expiry date attribute of agreements, users can quickly locate agreements that are set to expire in the next 90 days.
  • Eliminating Information Silos: In the era of Big Data, organizations need to bring order to their information chaos. Massive amounts of structured data and unstructured content often reside within multiple and disconnected platforms, applications, locations and devices. Using metadata as a bridge to connect structured data with unstructured content, organizations can eliminate information silos across different business systems, departments and devices. Regardless of where the data resides, it can be accessed and synced across various systems and devices with no duplication of content. For example, when a company leverages metadata to link its CRM system (structured data application) to its unstructured content repository, the sales force can access proposals, contracts and purchase orders directly from within the CRM system instead of having to navigate to the folder where these documents reside.
  • Automating Business Processes: To unlock the full potential of their Big Data, organizations must look beyond simply search and navigation and identify how they can leverage metadata for streamlining business processes. Metadata-driven workflows can serve to maintain consistency and quality in documentation while ensuring that employees follow defined processes, and that these processes are executed in a more seamless and efficient manner. By leveraging metadata to execute content-centric workflows, companies can assign tasks to employees, and track the status and state of all assignments, be notified when materials have been edited or modified, and ensure that important documentation has been reviewed and approved by the appropriate individuals before publication.
  • Protecting and Securing Confidential Information: The need to secure confidential information within Big Data repositories and systems has evolved past antiquated, folder-based security models. A metadata-driven approach allows organizations to assign and derive a document’s final access control settings from its metadata. With the ability to dynamically establish access permissions to sensitive content, metadata can be used to help ensure that confidential data is protected from individuals who do not have access rights. Many policies related to access permissions vary from business to business, while others are mandated by compliance requirements. Using a metadata-driven approach, information pertaining to the development and lifecycle of a document is captured at a granular level. As a result, permissions, audit trails and event logs are preserved, helping organizations verify compliance with defined access control policies.

With metadata’s abilities to ensure users can quickly and easily navigate through Big Data repositories to find the precise information they need, companies can extract the most value possible from Big Data. And that means we can expect to see even more creative approaches for organizing and managing information assets as businesses learn how to more fully exploit metadata.

Mika Javanainen is Senior Director of Product Management at M-Files Corporation. Javanainen is in charge of managing and developing M-Files product portfolio, roadmaps and pricing globally. Prior to his executive roles, Javanainen worked as a systems specialist, where he integrated document management systems with ERP and CRM applications. A published author, Javanainen has an executive MBA in International Business and Marketing. Follow Mika on Twitter (News - Alert) at @mikajava.




Edited by Kyle Piscioniere
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