Information is developing into a valuable asset for organisations, as digital information proliferates, and competitive advantage becomes more and more connected to timely and accurate data.
How can we best leverage such an asset and provide information that can be easily found, understood, used, and shared?
Identify your information as an asset
Creating and, most importantly, maintaining an Information Asset Register (IAR) helps to identify and manage your organisation’s information as a business asset.
An IAR identifies and documents information assets across an organisation, and may include the name of each asset, its location and backup location, a business impact level in terms of loss or unavailability, creation data, custodial data, description, disposal, format, legislation and regulation impacts, and access and security. Use your IAR together with other tools to weave a metadata framework into your Information Governance framework.
Build a metadata framework
Establishing Policies and identifying roles and responsibilities for metadata management and the systems, processes, and procedures that will be used to maintain the framework are essential to building a metadata framework.
Create a business glossary or set of approved terms and definitions to assist with the consistent application of metadata across an organisation. Consider using this business-specific glossary together with a metadata registry to bring together business terms, classification schemes, and the relationships between metadata schema from differing business areas.
Work your organisation’s business glossary, metadata registry, and metadata framework into its Information Governance Framework.
Target weak points in your metadata
Discovering and documenting the weak points in your organisation’s metadata management contributes to quality, fit-for-purpose metadata over time.
Does your metadata comply with current Standards? Are there areas of weakness that need to be targeted and improved as a priority, such as ensuring automated application of metadata in place of manual entry?
A review of metadata management within your organisation, and the documentation of both Policy and frameworks, leads to improved information management both now and in the future. Do you have the metadata you need for the challenges of migration, SharePoint integration, and Information Governance?
To find out more about metadata management and Information Governance, go to the IRIS Website or Connect with IRIS.
https://www.naa.gov.au/information-management/describing-information/metadata/managing-metadata
https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/metadata-management