In today’s digital age, information is at the heart of every enterprise’s operation, and understanding its intricacies is crucial for making informed decisions. In this blog, I will delve into the pivotal role that metadata plays in modern organisational decision making. I will share why CIOs must prioritise this often-overlooked aspect within their data strategy and daily operations. By uncovering the potential value that metadata harvesting can bring, I will share my perspective and explore how it can be harnessed as an asset for enhancing decision-making.
From speaking with CIOs at roundtable events and one on one meetings, a there is a general awareness that data management in an organisation can be challenging, and ever changing due to the multifaceted nature of the role the business places on them.
CIOs are tasked with overseeing complex data ecosystems, and these complexities stem from various factors. They must navigate rapidly evolving technology landscapes, staying abreast of emerging trends and ensuring that the organisation’s IT posture remains current and secure. Moreover, they face the challenge of balancing limited resources against the growing demand for data-related initiatives, such as data analytics and cybersecurity. Data governance, including data quality, privacy, and compliance, presents a continual challenge, particularly in an era of increasingly stringent regulations.
Additionally, the ever-increasing volume of data generated within organisations necessitates scalable solutions for storage, retrieval, and analysis.
One often underappreciated aspect in organisations’ is metadata management, yet when executed effectively, it can deliver a multitude of benefits, including improved data discoverability, enhanced data quality, streamlined compliance, and ultimately, more informed decision-making.
Harvesting metadata can unlock substantial value within an organisation’s data ecosystem. This practice goes beyond the mere organisation and categorisation of data; it offers a profound understanding of data assets. By meticulously capturing metadata, organisations can gain insights into the origins, quality, relationships, and usage patterns of their data. This wealth of contextual information, if harnessed correctly, becomes a powerful tool for enhancing decision-making. It allows decision-makers to assess the reliability and relevance of data for specific use cases, ultimately leading to more informed and effective choices. Additionally, metadata aids in data governance, ensuring compliance with regulations and maintaining data integrity. In a data-driven world, the ability to leverage metadata not only adds value but also helps organisations navigate complexities and seise strategic opportunities.
By harnessing metadata effectively, a CIO can transform data into a strategic asset, enabling better decision-making, improved data quality, and enhanced governance, ultimately giving the organisation a competitive advantage in today’s data-driven landscape.
Metadata is important because it helps you locate and comprehend the data you need for almost any data and information management project. For instance, in a data warehouse or data lake project, it will be difficult to provide correct information to business customers if you do not know which tables in your source applications hold the data they require. Similarly, a data catalog’s or glossary’s effectiveness depends on their capacity to give consumers accurate information about data in context. The project can fall short of expectations if you can’t identify pertinent, business-friendly metadata in your source systems to enable these operations.
You may already be aware of the issues posed by data. The issues are primarily related to the peculiarities of their metadata and not only getting access to their data. These factors include the location of the metadata, its volume and complexity, accessibility, and how easily—or not—it may be analysed and subsequently shared with other tools and technologies.
Metadata is important because it helps you locate and comprehend the data you need for almost any data and information management project, including a data monetisation endeavour.
The role of EPM
Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is a robust suite of integrated applications designed to help organisations plan, manage, and optimise their business performance effectively. At its core, EPM enables organisations to align their strategic objectives with financial planning, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting processes. It provides a comprehensive platform that allows for data consolidation, analysis, and modelling, empowering organisations to make informed decisions and adapt to changing business conditions swiftly.
With Oracle EPM, businesses can gain valuable insights into their financial and operational performance, improve the accuracy of their strategic financial forecasts, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. Furthermore, EPM supports collaboration and transparency across departments, facilitating better communication and coordination within the organisation.
Not only can you integrate Oracle general ledger balances data from Oracle ERP cloud with EPM, but you can also integrate the corresponding metadata as well.
Oracle General Ledger metadata from ERP can be loaded to your Oracle EPM application using Data Integration. The feature enables you to load the Oracle General Ledger hierarchy top node, segment value, description, parent, child, account type, etc.
By leveraging EPM to ingest ERP metadata, can further enhance financial analysis in a holistic manner. When you integrate with ERP, EPM gains access to a wealth of metadata related to financial transactions, such as accounts, cost centres, and product lines. This metadata enriches the financial analysis process by providing crucial context and categorisation for financial data. With the aid of ERP metadata, EPM can ensure consistency and accuracy in financial reporting, streamline the consolidation of financial information across different business units, and facilitate multidimensional financial analysis. This synergy between EPM and ERP metadata enables organisations to generate comprehensive financial insights, make more informed strategic decisions, and optimise financial performance effectively.
Integrating ERP Metadata into EPM.
In this link, you will discover the essential steps required to integrate ERP metadata into EPM:
Extracting Metadata to non-Oracle platforms.
In a recent customer project, a unique challenge arose where the client needed to extract metadata from their Oracle ERP system and integrate it with their Microsoft Purview platform. The client relied on Purview for compliance and reporting purposes and sought to incorporate the critical Oracle ERP metadata into their existing ecosystem.
Unfortunately, there is no direct connection between Oracle Fusion ERP and Microsoft Purview for metadata sharing. However, there is a way for the client to achieve this and it involved leveraging Oracle EPM.
Oracle limits access to the Oracle ERP Database for security purposes, in contrast to the on-premises era when customers had control over the entire application stack, now with the cloud Oracle is now responsible for managing access to the underlying database as well as patching and security.
With our guidance and by utilising Oracle EPM, they were able to bridge this gap and successfully integrate the much-needed metadata, ensuring a seamless flow of essential information between their ERP and Purview. This integration not only streamlined their data management processes but also enhanced their reporting and compliance capabilities.
The customer initiated the metadata integration by enabling it within their Oracle EPM platform. Following this, they configured a file extraction process in EPM that create a copy/backup of the metadata and stored it on an Oracle database. This setup allowed Microsoft Purview to establish a connection with the Oracle database, seamlessly accessing and utilising the integrated metadata for their compliance and reporting needs.
They extracted the metadata from their planning application to a flat file. Creating a flat file can have several uses, such as migration, creating a template for new dimensions, or as a Metadata backup.
To see the steps, you would need to go through, please see this EPM video on extracting Metadata. As part of the extraction, they set up a schedule to extract the latest copy for Purview to consume.
This formed the basis of solution. The target was an Oracle autonomous database v19c.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO5sJz8CWxQ
Disclaimer.
Microsoft Purview is mentioned here as a working example of a problem we had to help solve. The customer had a dual vendor cloud strategy, and we assisted in enabling them to achieve an aspect of their IT governance strategy.