“Given the sheer volume of data that businesses handle today, metadata is indispensable. It enhances data accessibility, making it easier to navigate large data sets and convert raw information into actionable insights. For example, a retail business can use metadata to quickly find sales data for a specific month, filtered by product category and region, without searching through all its data,” IBM notes on its website.
As more small business turn to low-code and no-code AI platforms to build capable systems without hiring data scientists, here’s how they can consider metadata management to refine their solutions.
A Foundational Understanding of Metadata
About 90% of business data is unstructured and often siloed across systems, according to a Box-sponsored IDC white paper. In a blog, Box further highlights that metadata management “provides the foundational structure and context for data governance, enabling consistent standards, compliance, and quality across the organization.”
This Salesforce guide on metadata describes the difference between data and metadata as like the structure of a book: “The data makes up the text of the book, while the metadata is the title, chapter headings, publication information, page numbers and other tags that organize the text.”
EXPLORE: How can SMB leaders turn raw data into real insights?
This puts into perspective the different types of metadata that can help with management.
Descriptive metadata is useful for discovery and identification, and it includes elements such as title, abstract, author and keywords. Think of it also as business metadata, where such context is relevant for end users who need the data for their own data projects.
Structural metadata provides information about the structure of content and how compound objects are put together — for example, how pages are ordered to form chapters.
Administrative metadata covers the certain policies around data, including access permissions and ownership, rights, reproduction and preservation.
Ultimately, fostering a data-forward culture will only help small businesses build a strong base for when they look to automate certain processes. CDW Solutions Architect John Klein writes that agentic AI is supporting small business contact centers with faster response times and lower operating costs.
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