There will be a meeting of anyone interested in learning more about the MPO at the Royal Plaza Hotel, in Orlando following the Data Governance Conference at 5:15 PM on Dec. 6th. Members of the MPO board and Advisory Board will be available. For further information please email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Plans are in progress for MPO member content based teleconferences, podcasts and webinars for the first quarter of 2007. Possible topics will include data lineage and reassessing your metadata function. Information regarding these events will be sent to MPO members within the next few weeks.

Nominations are open for the following positions for the 2007 MPO Board.

VP Marketing-Responsible for the marketing strategy for the MPO.

VP Operations-Responsible for administration and operating functions of the organization and written correspondence

Treasurer-Responsible for the organization's financial duties

VP Industry Relationships-Responsible for promoting and developing relationships with other organizations such as standard bodies, user groups, and conferences

Online Services-Responsible for the web and online strategy for the organization. Should have some knowledge of web development

In addition to the elected positions there are also several appointed positions available

Information About Board Positions

The length of term of elected officers is one year.

All nominees must be members of the MPO

Nominees should have overall knowledge of metadata but do not need to be experts

Nominees need to possess a genuine willing to help others in learning and enhancing their knowledge and experience in metadata management.

Deadline for nominations is Dec. 15, 2006

Ballots will be sent to MPO members the week of Dec. 18, 2006

Please submit nominations or any questions regarding nominations and board positions to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Attention meta-data vendors and consultants ~ are you interested in sponsoring an MPO webinar, teleconference, or meeting ? Please email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Michael M. Gorman
Whitemarsh Information Systems Corporation


No one would argue that enterprises should have its financial books in order. How else can you know where you’ve been, where you are, and where you project you’d like to go? Just what is the “data” that’s in the financial books? It’s not real data, because in fact, its abstract representations of the real data. Thus, financial data is metadata. Not IT metadata, but financial metadata. If it were real data, then you’d actually see the inventory, the reserves, the manufacturing costs, and the real HR benefits. But you don’t. What you see are abstract representations of these, hence, metadata. What then is the financial system that manages all the financial data? It’s a financial-metadata management system. A key measure of the quality of the enterprise is the quality of its financial-metadata within its financial-metadata management system? You cannot have enterprise-wide, integrated and non-redundant quality financial data without an integrated, federated and non-redundant financial- metadata management system. These go hand and glove.

Analogously, IT has its set of books and in those books are metadata. Thus, the system to manage IT’s metadata is a metadata management system. And, a key measure of the quality of the enterprise is the quality of its IT-metadata management system? You cannot have enterprise-wide, integrated and non-redundant quality IT-metadata data without an integrated, federated and non-redundant metadata management system. These too go hand and glove.

With that as a backdrop, you finally get that appointment with the CIO. You go into his office and say:
We need a comprehensive, nonredundant, and integrated semantic definition of all our data as it is employed in structured databases. To accomplish this we need an integrated, federated and non- redundant metadata management system. We need this to ensure we have quality data.

Then you say,
Did you know that a “google-search” on the phrase “data quality” produces 411,000 hits? A quick review of this shows that almost all the hits refer to documents about data quality problems. Data quality problems are rooted in discordant semantics, which are, the rules for meaning and usage. For example we don’t have a policy regarding:
Having or not having dashes in social security numbers

0 and 1 for Gender, and 1 and 2 for Gender. (Value domain mismatch)

Mike Gorman vs. Michael M. Gorman (Same person, different names errors)

Michael M. Gorman vs. Michael M. Gorman (Different persons, same name)

March East Region Sales = Sales for March of NE Division + Sales of March of SE Division. But, the March Sales of NE Division is Net After Expenses, while the March Sales of SE Division is Total Monthly Sales.

Then you say:
The challenge is not whether there are data quality issues, nor how to fix them, but how to design these data quality issues out of the IT process from the very beginning. Not only will this make fixing errors faster, it also will make IT system development faster and cheaper to evolve and maintain. To accomplish this, we need to install an infrastructure of quality IT metadata and with it a quality metadata management system

At this point, your CIO is likely to say:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve been hearing that for years, or
Prove it, or
OK, show me.

Now, what are you going to do? What’s your approach to convince the CIO that if you practice “safe metadata” by installing an enterprise- wide metadata management system and infrastructure that there will be measurable improvement in quality and productivity, and measurable decreases in cost and risk? These are the four items on the bottom line. If your installed metadata management system cannot deliver on these then you will and you should be judged a failure. So, what are you going to do? Here are some suggestions.

Determine how many programs are being written to essentially perform an ETL function. If you had data with high quality semantics then these programs would largely be unneeded. Yes, these programs would be needed for building summaries and the like, but the on-line analytical programs are largely accomplishing that role. The existence of these systems therefore is a direct consequence of not having a quality metadata infrastructure. So, compute the life cycle cost of these systems and add this to the Cost of Bad Metadata Management.

Determine how long it takes to design a program to process against a database. Does the program have to “fight” with the database’s design and build all sorts of temp files, extracts, and the like? All of that is generally due to bad database design. If a database is very well designed, then building the essential logic of the program is a code generation step. Figure out the quantity of function points of these programs and divide each by the quantity of database tables that are being accessed. The quantity of function points should be about 80. Additionally, the cost to build the function point, if you are using a code generator should be about $50 The very existence of this fight and all the infrastructures that must be created to compensate is a direct result of not having a quality, enterprise- wide, and federated metadata management infrastructure. So, compute these costs and take the excess and add it to the Cost of Bad Metadata Management.

Do you have standardized reference data? Reference data is metadata. It is created, managed, distributed, and employed across all databases and information systems in the enterprise either physically or virtually. So, compute the cost of defining each effectively duplicated set of reference data, and then add all the costs in excess of creating and maintaining reference data more than once to the Cost of Bad Metadata Management.

Do you have authoritative data sources? These are now called Master Data. Some organizations also call these data Strategic Data. Regardless, the process and infrastructure of defining, knowing about, and managing all this master data is metadata management. Thus, if there is more than once definitive source for all multiply used data, then compute the cost all this master data creation and maintenance more than once then add that to the Cost of Bad Metadata Management.

Do you have enterprise identifiers for all assets that reside in our IT enterprise? An enterprise identifier is a unique number that is not information- bearing that is assigned to each asset as it first comes into existence within the enterprise. Are there a central database and supporting metadata management system for maintaining all the metadata about these enterprise identified assets? If enterprise identifiers are not created and maintained, then compute the cost of all the cross reference identifiers, and compute the cost of all the human and computer resources necessary to determine the unique set of assets. Subtract from these costs the costs to create and use a single set of enterprise identifiers. Add the difference to the Cost of Bad Metadata Management.

When the managers get together to build budgets for your business, do they argue about what the “numbers” mean. That is, do they have different numbers for the count of employees, total sales, cost of inventory, value of assets, and all that? If they have conflicting numbers, then while the cost of creating all those conflicting numbers is accounted for, compute the cost of all those arguments and the cost of coming to a determination of the correct “numbers.” The infrastructure that contains all the definitions, the processes that compute the numbers, their supporting systems, the calendar and business cycles that are operating to compute the results, and of course the interrelationships among al these definitions, numbers, calendars, and business cycles are all metadata and the system to manage it is the metadata management system. So, again, compute the cost of all these redundancies, fights, time, effort and energy to resolve the discrepancies, and add that cost to the Cost of Bad Metadata Management.

Now, if you are armed with these numbers then you can quickly say something like this to the CIO:
If we have quality metadata and a quality metadata management system then we can reduce the cost of all software design and implementation by at least 40%. We can reduce the quantity of data storage by 50%.
Now, he’ll listen to your story because you’re talking the CIO’s language: improved productivity, reduced cost, lowered risk, and increased quality. Metadata management is as essential to a well-ordered enterprise as is its set of well-ordered financial books. It’s that simple.

Mike can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it