Create a Business Case for Metadata

Management to Best Fulfill Your Data and

Analytics Initiatives
Published: 17 May 2019 ID: G00378478

Analyst(s): Guido De Simoni

A solid business case is essential for successful metadata management

initiatives. Data and analytics leaders should use Gartner’s seven-step
process to develop a business case that will attract engagement from
business stakeholders and demonstrate business value through measurable
KPIs.

Key Challenges
■ Metadata management initiatives often struggle from their proponents underestimating the right
engagement on data ownership and with subject matter experts. Inconsistent executive
sponsorship as well as competition for resources and funding with other initiatives can also hold
them back.
■ Metadata management is still a growing discipline in many organizations, representing only
12% of the overall effort within data management compared to 20% for data quality and 24%
spent for data integration.
■ Metadata management initiatives require the participation of a wide set of roles — including
business roles. This participation will lose momentum without measurable key performance
indicators (KPIs) and business stakeholders who ratify the financial benefits of metadata
management.

Recommendations
Data and analytics leaders focused on data and analytics strategies that leverage metadata
management capabilities should:

■ Create and maintain business stakeholder engagement by developing and promoting a

compelling business vision and strategy that articulate personal value to the individual and
quantifiably support the overall corporate initiatives.
 ■ Establish effective business-centric metrics by collaborating closely with stakeholders to
identify their most important business goals and metrics.
■ Document and display through a dashboard the financial results of the metadata management
initiative by translating metrics into business value, and by ensuring initiative goals stay aligned
with critical executive priorities.
■ Communicate metadata management initiative progress and milestones frequently and widely
by applying effective change management.

Strategic Planning Assumption

By 2022, organizations utilizing active metadata to dynamically connect, optimize and automate
data integration processes will reduce time to data delivery by 30%.

Introduction
Metadata management initiatives struggle to achieve and sustain business engagement. This is
because the initiatives are created with limited or even no involvement from business stakeholders,
meaning their real value is misunderstood. In addition, business stakeholders often don’t own their
own critical roles in such initiatives. In many organizations, metadata management is still a growing
discipline that represents only 12% of the time spent on data management (see “The State of
Metadata Management”).

With this lack of business engagement, metadata management initiatives are exposed to issues
including their proponents underestimating the right engagement on data ownership and with
subject matter experts, inconsistent executive sponsorship, and competition for resources and
funding with other initiatives.

More traditional IT-led metadata management initiatives continue to struggle to engage the
business.

This situation can in turn prevent the eventual implementation of a successful overall enterprise
information management (EIM) discipline within an organization. How can data and analytics
leaders, including chief data officers (CDOs), overcome these issues and secure active participation
from business stakeholders in metadata management initiatives?

We introduce here a method for increasing engagement between the IT department and the
business in relation to a metadata management initiative:

■ Develop business-oriented KPIs

■ Assess the current state
■ Assign a business value to the “to be” state

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 Analysis
Data and analytics leaders should create a complete picture of the business value of their metadata
management initiatives by following the seven-step business case development process
summarized in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Highlight Metadata Management Business Value in Seven Steps

A comprehensive business case is crucial for gaining business stakeholder engagement and setting
the program in the context of quantifiable business benefits. Informed and active support greatly
increases the likelihood of success for metadata management initiatives.

Engage Business Stakeholders by Pushing a Compelling Business Vision and

Strategy

Step 1. Identify Vision, Strategy and Stakeholders

Metadata management initiatives must clearly support the organization’s business vision and the
resulting business objectives (see “4 Use Cases That Drive Critical Capabilities in Metadata
Management”). Metadata management’s pervasiveness requires a combination of IT and business
metrics to measure the success of the initiative (see “The State of Metadata Management”). In
addition, there are no business visions and strategies that metadata management can sufficiently

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 fulfill by itself; therefore, leading with the business vision provides assurance that all required
capabilities will be identified.

Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Visions

“Top-down” business visions typically revolve around statements aspiring to leadership in a chosen
market. They are underpinned by strategies for excelling in areas such as operational effectiveness,
customer intimacy and product or service leadership. In most large and complex organizations,
these goals are difficult, if not impossible, to achieve without well-functioning and well-integrated
technologies, people and processes.

For example, a manufacturing company’s failure to address metadata management as a discipline

makes it difficult to differentiate itself by investing in digital twins to create new data-driven value
chains that will enhance its industry leadership (see “Exploiting Digital Twins to Drive Ecosystem
Strategies”).

“Bottom-up” business visions may also be formulated. These identify specific individual processes
that are inefficient or ineffective, or that cannot currently be enabled at all, and the costs of
continuing to operate in such a manner.

The most effective business visions often involve both top-down and bottom-up perspectives.

Repeatable Effort

While the overall data and analytics strategy identifies the top business priorities and defines a
desired business outcome, the data pertinent to that business outcome must be identified. As data
and analytics leader, you should therefore focus on managing the metadata of this data. This will
require increased visibility into many business processes or business units in order to validate how
certain data is reused.

Metadata management enhances auditing, monitoring and reporting of a sympathetic use case for
data, and even sharing that data outside the organization to strengthen partner coordination. Still,
since there will never be enough resources to satisfy enterprisewide demand, it is important to
maximize value through repeatable effort — do once, use many times. Although metadata
management can be done more tactically, it requires program management to succeed — generally
evolving as part of an EIM program for the strategies needed to support business priorities and
outcomes. However, since the demand for improved understanding and leveraging of information
assets can be overwhelming, most organizations tend to mature their metadata management efforts
from tactical to enterprise metadata management (EMM) via more considerable efforts over time.
EMM, however, requires a maturity curve on metadata management not found in many
organizations today (see “Key Recommendations for Implementing Enterprise Metadata
Management Across the Organization”).

Business Sponsorship

In many enterprises, there is no high-level business sponsorship. Consequently, the IT department

(often one of the few cross-enterprise unifying points) or a functional head (taking a leading role)

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 must spend time and energy trying to get other stakeholders on board. This may be a long and
difficult process, and the metadata management team, when it is established, may have to use a
variety of tactics to build engagement and momentum.

Critical metadata management stakeholders usually include process owners, data stewards,
business analysts and business sponsors of a specific use case (data governance or risk
management and compliance, for example). The number, role and involvement of these individuals
vary depending on the metadata management initiative scope. You need to identify the critical
metadata management stakeholder in reference to the key parts of the business value chain that are
being focused on with the metadata initiative.

The very nature of metadata management initiatives being linked under a business-oriented scope
will lead to different roles and organizational challenges. For example, if you are focused on data
lineage for ERP data going into a data lake, you need to work with database administrators and
business users of applications to understand the ontology. At the same time, you must comply with
governance requirements on the same data in the lake.

This is the job of the sponsor: to make sure that the different contributors and users know when
there are expectations to be met.

Establish Business-Centric Metrics by Identifying Stakeholders’ Most Important

Business Goals and Metrics (Steps 2-4)

Step 2. Select Business Metrics

Enterprises often overlook the fact that business performance metrics must be proposed and
owned by the business. The IT department can’t do this job because it does not have the final say
about the key processes or how their enablement or improvement can contribute to business value.
Nor is the IT department best-placed to decide how to measure success and what success looks
like in business terms.

These key business processes are owned by business stakeholders. Their career successes (and
annual bonuses) depend on the successful implementation, execution and continuing improvement
of these processes. Although IT-centric metrics such as raw data quality should certainly be
identified and tracked, they should not be the centerpiece of communications about stakeholder
value (see “Toolkit: Enabling Data Literacy and Information as a Second Language”).

When creating metrics, it’s important to ensure that:

■ All metrics, when used collectively, are leading indicators of financial performance
■ Metrics focus on all relevant key stakeholders and their prioritized outcomes
■ Metrics foster collaboration and enable comparisons with internal and external entities
■ Metrics are made flexible by an architecture that enables many combinations of standard and
custom metrics

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 ■ Metrics capture cause-and-effect relationships among business functions
■ Metrics are selected based on data that is available in automated business systems
■ The model can evolve and develop through the addition and deletion of metrics

Finally, a notable common symptom of a lack of connection between metadata management and a
business vision is that all currently identified metrics for metadata management success involve
data quality (for example, data accuracy) rather than business process performance. Data and
analytics leaders must be vigilant to avoid this situation.

The Gartner digital business value framework (DBVF) is the next generation of metrics that measure
the capabilities and differentiating opportunities of digital technologies in the context of specific
desirable business outcomes (see “The Gartner Digital Business Value Framework”). DBVF is a way
to identify operational and financial metrics, not create them. Think of it as the common language
that bridges the gap between high-level, strategic positions and the tactical activities that execute
them. The same principles apply when thinking about metrics for metadata management.

Step 3. Establish a Baseline for the Selected Business Metrics

Consider the DBVF or a similar framework as a starting point. Consider these different levels of an
organization’s performance management metrics:

■ At the top level are the metrics relating to the business in terms of demand management, supply
management and support services.
■ Down a level are the aggregate measures of functional areas such as sales (for example, sales
effectiveness) and service (for example, customer responsiveness).
■ Down another level are the prime metrics for key business processes (such as on-time delivery,
customer retention and cost of sales).
■ At the base level (not provided with the DBVF) are metrics for measuring metadata management
initiatives’ specific capabilities.

It’s important to have measurable business-level metrics and to establish a baseline for these
metrics before the metadata management initiative starts. When gathering the data, use the average
performance for each business-process-level metric during the past 12 months. This prepares you
to employ a 12-month rolling average to make ongoing comparisons of actual performance against
baseline performance.

For several modern metadata management initiatives, there are top-line business metrics focused
on:

■ Impact on revenue due to faster time to insight

■ Lower cost to find and validate data with automation and self-service

These can be mapped to metrics on productivity around specific data domains:

■ Average time to complete the data selection phase of analytics projects

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 ■ Percentage increase in the reuse of data and analytics assets
■ Percentage of datasets and analytics assets that leverage semantic consistency

These can subsequently be mapped to usage and adoption of metadata management capabilities,
such as data catalogs, data lineage, business glossary and active metadata. Some examples:

■ Metadata on the frequency of access to measure integration success

■ Metadata on data quality to support information governance
■ Metadata on lineage to support governed analytics

Once established, metrics provide an excellent basis for communicating strategies and objectives
throughout the organization, so that everyone at the functional, business unit, team or individual
level understands the direction and what is expected of them. Thus, metrics are a key foundation for
change management both at the beginning and on an ongoing basis, as results are collected and
compared with targets and adjustments are made (see “Use Gartner’s Value Pyramid to Connect
Data and Analytics to Business Value”).

Step 4. Negotiate Targeted Improvements to the Baseline Performance Levels

The business owners who are responsible for the areas being measured (by the metrics selected)
must accept accountability for targeted improvements arising from the metadata management
initiatives.

Usually, this is an iterative process involving data and analytics teams and the relevant business
stakeholders or process owners. First make preliminary assumptions and estimates. Then revise
them after the step described in the next section — converting the targeted improvements to
baseline performance levels into financial results.

Translate Metrics Into Business Value and Ensure Initiative Goals Stay Aligned With
Executive Priorities (Steps 5-7)

Step 5. Convert the Targeted Improvements Into Financial Results

To use performance metrics to quantify the benefits of your metadata management initiative, the
metrics must be linked to financial results. The financial stakeholders in your organization can help
with this task.

Many business processes are supported by data and metadata. The connection value must be
linked directly to financial key metrics such as revenue and cost after evaluating and documenting
the relevant impact (see the impacts of metadata management on cost-effectiveness and
optimization in Figure 2).

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 Figure 2. Impacts of Metadata Management on Cost-Effectiveness and Optimization

Step 6. Model the Total Cost of Ownership

Costs for metadata management initiatives vary depending on the scope, assumptions and
estimates that are made. A TCO model should include the total inputs for one-time and ongoing
costs for the program’s technologies and business components. It also requires any cost offsets —
reductions and savings — to be identified. Develop the TCO model for at least a three-year time
period.

Incurred costs are split into three categories:

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 ■ Technology costs — All costs related to the hardware and software associated with the
initiative, such as application programs, servers and networking. An increasing number of
metadata management solution vendors are now offering subscription pricing and cloud-based
delivery options (see “Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions”). In addition,
consider the technical debt associated with the business reliance and tie-in to the metadata
management initiatives.
■ Personnel costs — All the HR costs (employee- and ESP-related) associated with the initiative,
including the cost of new hires, overtime for existing hourly paid employees and salaries for
temporary help.
■ Operations and process costs — The remaining business-related costs associated with the
initiative, such as the cost of business disruptions, downtime and latency.

Data and analytics leaders should use the following guidelines to manage TCO successfully:

■ Understand each TCO component. Build best- and worst-case scenarios to determine TCO
tolerances.
■ Include financial analysts in the project to provide assistance with the board approval process,
and to provide insights for senior management during the initiative’s life cycle.
■ Align the TCO model with project phases and milestones, and produce a graphical display of
the costs.
■ Obtain a commitment from senior management to the assumptions that underline each TCO
component and the scenarios within which it operates.
■ Expect software and ESP vendor proposals and internal staffing decisions to precede a final
TCO calculation.
■ Expect the TCO model to drive many project decisions (for example, the use of ESPs, vendor
selections, internal staffing scenarios and phasing).

Step 7. Calculate the ROI

Start with an assessment of the plausible outcomes — in terms of costs and benefits — that are
possible upon implementation of the metadata management initiative. Next, evaluate the relative
likelihood of each scenario against the others. Finally, ensure that the costs and benefits of each
scenario are evaluated in net present value (NPV) terms to de-emphasize long-term outcomes in
favor of those that are more immediate. If this process is unfamiliar to you, obtain help from the
finance department (see Note 1).

As metadata management investments take many forms and give benefits that are financial
(tangible) and nonfinancial (intangible), ROI alone won’t be sufficient to capture their value to your
organization. Benefits may arise in different areas. They may, for example, relate to data
governance, risk management and compliance, data analysis, and data value (see “4 Use Cases
That Drive Critical Capabilities in Metadata Management”). These benefits can be viewed in terms of
risk and reward. Where risks are certain, such as in relation to compliance with legal requirements

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 and regulations, metadata management initiatives are easier to justify. But where the risks (and
rewards) are uncertain, such as whether a first-mover advantage can be gained by entering a new
market, they are less easy to justify overall.

Communicate Progress and Milestones Frequently and Widely by Applying Effective

Change Management
Today’s metadata management initiative requirements exceed the capabilities of any one tool,
subject area, business domain, capability, competency or person. Instead, they require holistic, all-
encompassing consideration of metadata management. This mandates the inclusion of competing
perspectives and technologies to collaborate harmoniously on growing advanced analytics, to
address critical use cases.

People leading metadata management initiatives must possess vast knowledge and skills related to
data literacy, governance, provenance and organization. Metadata management is not only a
technology problem and not only a data problem — it is also a business problem. It must be
addressed through active communication and collaboration, augmented with concise KPIs and
metrics.

One-size-fits-all communications cannot deliver the right information and motivation to the many
different stakeholders involved in your metadata management initiative. So it is important that you
revisit the different stakeholder expectations and inform them about the state of the initiative with
specific focus assessment, over balanced milestones (every three to six months — see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Update Stakeholders With Specific Focus Assessment

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 For example, imagine that your CFO was a vocal supporter of your purchase of metadata
management solutions. Although the CFO won’t probably have to learn how to use the software,
you should plan a regular cadence of communications to brief them on the initiative status and any
challenges or success stories during implementation. Use these communications opportunities to
reinforce the CFO’s confidence in spending decisions. Include them in your stakeholder list so you
remember to include this communications workstream in your plan.

Gartner Recommended Reading

Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

“Five Ways to Use Metadata Management to Deliver Business Value for Data”

“Metadata Is the Fish Finder in Data Lakes”

“Use Enterprise Metadata Management to Extend Information Governance to Analytics”

“Use Gartner’s Value Pyramid to Connect Data and Analytics to Business Value”

“Predicts 2019: Data Management Solutions”

Evidence
The fact base for this research derives from users of the Gartner client inquiry service, surveys of IT
leaders, workshops and case studies conducted with end-user organizations. The sources include
but are not limited to:

■ Gartner client interactions on metadata management and data catalogs, which have doubled in
2018 compared with 2017. Interest in 2019 is continuing to grow.
■ Interactive briefings in which vendors provided Gartner with updates on their strategy, market
positioning, recent key developments and product roadmaps.
■ Discussions with Gartner colleagues with expertise in this area.

Further Reading:

A. Neely, C. Adams, M. Kennerley. “The Performance Prism: The Scorecard for Measuring and
Managing Business Success: The Scorecard for Measuring and Managing Stakeholder
Relationships.” Financial Times/Prentice Hall. 2002.

Note 1 Common Methods for Calculating ROI

■ Net present value (NPV): The discounted value of future cash flows minus the present value of
the investment and associated future cash flows. It results from a multiyear investment.

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 ■ Payback period: An investment’s payback period is equal to the net investment divided by the
average annual cash flow from that investment. It answers the question, “How long will it be
until I get my money back?” and is measured in months or years.
■ Internal rate of return (IRR): The discounted rate that results in an NPV of zero for a series of
future cash flows. It’s a “hurdle rate” or cutoff rate of return. Avoid investments with IRRs less
than the cost of capital or desired rate of return. IRR is measured as a percentage.

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