Every successful enterprise architecture relies on enterprise metadata management as part of its foundation.
Introduction
Almost every large government agency or Global 2000 company is struggling to properly manage an enterprise information technology (IT) architecture. This difficulty is the direct result of the highly distributed, dis-joined and overly expensive IT environments which currently exist throughout our industry. This situation has resulted in the reemergence of corporations looking to establish truly proactive Enterprise Architecture organizations. Therefore, a discussion about enterprise architecture and how it is tied to an enterprise metadata management initiative is necessary.
Importance of Enterprise Architecture
The goals for any organization’s Enterprise Architecture will differ slightly from one organization to another; however, there some common themes in most enterprise architecture teams.
First, these teams want to reduce/prevent redundant or even unnecessary IT applications from being developed. This issue of application redundancy is a significant problem that has a profound negative impact on a company’s IT budget.
Second, it is common for these teams to try to enable data reuse. Traditionally, IT professionals have been notorious for “re-inventing the wheel”. In the majority of corporations there is minimal to almost no data reuse, or effective data management. When a new application is deemed necessary typically the IT team tasked with building the system will look to construct every entity from scratch, as opposed to reusing work that has already been accomplished.
Third, Enterprise Architecture teams often set system architecture standards that need to be followed throughout the organization. These standards will vary greatly from firm to firm; however, standards around data integration, data movement, messaging, data warehousing and the system development life-cycle are the most common standards that these Enterprise Architecture teams strive to define.
Fourth, many times the very first task that these Enterprise Architecture teams look to achieve is the design and construction of an enterprise wide metadata repository. The reason that these teams target a metadata management application is that they view this application as the technological means to manage and enforce their enterprise architecture practices.
Metadata Management’s Importance to Enterprise Architecture
All too often Enterprise Architecture teams are trying to, at an enterprise perspective, manage their IT systems Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. Obviously this low-tech approach to managing highly complex technical environments tends to be less than successful. In general, the more successful Enterprise Architecture teams realize that it is the metadata repository that will provide them with the technical “teeth” that they need to be successful.
For example, a metadata repository plays a vital role in the establishment and enforcement of enterprise architecture standards. Suppose that the Enterprise Architecture team wants to enforce standardized names for physical entities and attributes. The metadata repository can be used as a persistent store for those standards. Then the repository can provide all the development teams access to the standards so that they can make sure that their new entities and attributes conform to them. In addition, the repository would provide the development teams with the capability to request/post new entities and attributes to be added to the standard.
Conclusion
Clearly, the lack of a solid enterprise level metadata repository makes the task of the Enterprise Architecture team highly difficult. Moreover, there are few world-class Enterprise Architecture teams that do not have the support of a world-class enterprise level metadata repository. On the other hand, you do not find many world-class enterprise wide metadata repositories that do not support an Enterprise Architecture team. Most organizations that want and need metadata repositories also need to establish enterprise architecture teams.