Take a look at any organisation and you will find metadata and taxonomies in every database and information system across the enterprise expressed in the form of lists, lookup sets, metadata, tags, taxonomies, file plans, term sets in term stores…

Who’s in control? Chances are – no one. It’s a random world out there!

When major systems fail, poor governance is often cited as the reason. Dig in and you’ll find taxonomy and data/metadata quality issues are a major concern. Here’s a bunch of articles we collected on Flipboard that support this finding and more on our Lest we forget website.

Organizations are slowly waking up to the need for specialists to create and enforce enterprise terminology standards and new roles are evolving. Where are these specialists coming from?

I did some quick research on LinkedIn looking for specialist roles engaged in aspects of classification and metadata. Searching within current job title, located anywhere delivers the following results:

I once thought that this was an area in which information governance professionals would assume a leadership role – managing enterprise taxonomies is a natural extension to managing the business classification scheme.

But contrary to my expectations, most specialists are emerging from the big data/data warehousing movement.

The Gartner Group have linked the effectiveness of big data analytics and business intelligence to data / metadata quality and governance. Pitching to CIOs’ Gartner state that:

“Information governance programs like master data management (MDM) are key to efforts in gaining value from information reuse across an organization and are central to enterprise information management.”

How the goal posts have moved in just a few short years.