The control and ownership of data and metadata is fast becoming a contentious issue. The value of both is rapidly increasing. While crunching data allows you to derive business intelligence to make better informed decisions, analyzing metadata allows you to identify specific behavioral patterns.
The magic of metadata lies in its ability to better classify and organize information, as well as to yield deeper insight into the actions taking place across your business. Perhaps most importantly it allows a rich perspective into customer behavior, allowing businesses to differentiate themselves in the market.
Truly digital businesses are ones that have their customers firmly in sight. Think Airbnb, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. What differentiates them are their business models. Disruptors are not those that own the technology but those that own the customer.
Your ERP system is the heart of this ecosystem. Understanding and adopting analytics enables businesses to determine how they can derive more insights from their data and metadata in order to make better-informed decisions than ever before. The right ERP solution should provide your business with the analytics and resulting business intelligence required to disrupt your industry if you so choose.
The contentious issue arises with many organizations storing data off-site and through the cloud. The question begs: who gets access to this data, and more importantly the metadata and resulting intelligence?
Forward-looking CIOs must turn their attention to developing a data model that ensures there’s continuity and governance with respect to data and metadata, and most importantly, that they can extract business value from these assets, and keep this value exclusive.
If data and metadata are to be competitive accelerators for your business, you need a strategy that ensures you have control of, and access to it all.
