Are you forgetting this?

Do you have a plan for metadata management? Do you know what metadata is?

As the professional world has shifted online to platforms like Microsoft Teams and other business collaboration websites and apps, the data companies produce has proliferated exponentially, in the form of emails, chats, notes, documents, spreadsheets, and more. Domo has reported that nearly 160 million emails are sent every minute across the globe. Every minute, over 12 million texts are sent, and the United States alone uses over three million gigabytes of data across the internet per minute!

How many times have you heard, “Hold on, let me find that.” Or even better, “I’ll find that and send that to you after this …”

These platforms each have search capabilities, however as with any data, you need to reference it in meaningful ways. This allows a search or filter function to be so much more useful. These references are metadata.

As more data is created, it becomes especially important that a good metadata management strategy is put into place. Not only should you know what the data is, but its origin, its author, dates received or processed, and even the full chain of custody as it is transformed and exchanged. Just as the meta data is critical to your knowledge data, it is also critical in your transactional and reporting systems. Capture what you can, and always enhance these capabilities. Report things like filename, IP address, data size, and anything else that a given protocol might provide.

Inside any data set, there are also valuable points of information that should be considered. Many messages, including standard message types across industries, contain identifiers and field level dates. These values are often different than the dates or identifiers referenced by the protocol or the payload as a whole. 

An example of this is when managing claims or invoices, at times, you have to re-process data. When doing this, you should be sure you understand the archiving and logging requirements in order to avoid duplicating the data again on disk or elsewhere. Remember, persisted data is a risk today. If it is electronic, it is accessible, so always follow solid Privacy and Security practices.

Hybrid Integration Platforms (HIP) such as the one used by Vorro, will continue to be deployed. Your organization needs to be able to leverage investments in on premise data systems, and at the same time, continue to move some of that to the cloud. Some companies are even deploying multi-cloud models, where services are deployed across both Microsoft and Amazon hosting solutions.

I appreciate having the ability to simply integrate where we need to, but if somebody doesn’t get a handle on the tweet storm in Teams, I’m gonna….  

Does the current environment have you looking for ways to improve, scale or increase current productivity and processes? Take advantage now and start building for the future. Speak with the data integration specialist at Vorro. Feel free to request a consultation or demo on our website at https://vorro.net/. #IntegrateNow