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Experts say that the more valuable the information asset, the more metadata you'll find associated with it, and therefore the more critical managing metadata becomes to your organisation. According to the Gartner research report, 'How Metadata Improves Business Opportunities and Threats', "Metadata unlocks the value of data and, therefore, requires management attention. Failure to manage metadata properly will hamper critical activities such as information management, business process management and service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives".

Unfortunately for many companies, metadata continues to be an afterthought, particularly where information management is concerned. As a result, many of them are missing out on the myriad business benefits that proper metadata management offers.

WHAT IS METADATA AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
Wikipedia defines metadata as "structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use or manage an information resource". Examples of the most basic metadata associated with documents include informational properties such as author, date created, date modified and file size.

Documents and other information assets are not of value unless they can be found and reused, and finding data fast can mean the difference between work getting done today versus tomorrow - or not at all. Metadata offers a powerful and effective way to access, organise and track vital business information and processes.

Also important is the value that metadata offers for creating associations and relationships between documents and other information across one or more repositories or related applications, such as an ERP or CRM system. In addition, metadata offers significant benefits for instituting consistency in the way information is used, stored and shared, as well as providing clarity about data histories, and ensuring workflows and business processes are properly followed and administered. For example, metadata may include information on the lifecycle of a document, including the users, processes and applications involved in its creation, revision and ultimate archival, retention and destruction. This includes granular details that drill down to the exact timestamp of changes and actions, such as reviews and approvals, as well as the access permissions involved in performing them.

In other words, metadata organises and tracks the entire digital lifecycle of important business information, including the processes and users that affect it, providing a precise audit trail that can prove invaluable -- or mandatory in highly-regulated industries. Protecting and organising this audit trail is yet another reason why metadata should be a cornerstone of your information management strategy.

The value of metadata lies in its ability to more efficiently classify and organise information, as well as to yield deeper insight into the actions taking place across your business. This insight provides more intelligence and higher quality information to fuel big data initiatives, automation, compliance, data sharing, collaboration and more. Yet, many information management applications use metadata only as an additional information layer and rely on traditional folder structures to organise information. Consequently, users consider metadata as something optional and as extra work, which often leads to bad metadata quality. On the other hand, effective metadata-based information management systems only ask users to describe the document or data object with tags and properties when saving it. This enables users to search for information in a manner that is most logical to them (i.e. project name, date, contract type, customer, etc.).

MANAGING METADATA: A BEST-PRACTICE APPROACH
Metadata exists for all structured content in your organisation, and most unstructured content (i.e. documents and other files) also contains basic metadata properties, such as name, size, type, author, various dates and other attributes. Microsoft Office files (i.e., Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook), for example, contain considerable metadata information, such as number of pages and words, and the name of the person who modified the document last.

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