IT May Manage your Metadata, but your Business Must Own it!

Brian Courtney & Joshua Cruz

You’ve got a few terabytes of data to migrate to the cloud, a schema to define, and you’ll need to deploy identity management with federated identification. Sounds like a job for IT, but this isn’t just an IT project, this is an asset management project with business metadata that your marketing team must manage and maintain.  

Perhaps it’s just because I’m writing this before lunch, but I liken this to you placing an order at a restaurant. Your order/request is relayed to the wait staff, who relays it to the cook, who gives it back to the wait staff to transport back to you.  

Think of the wait staff as your IT team, managing requests and data transfers back to you. But that isn’t the magic, the magic is the meal. The meal is your data, how it’s constructed and presented. That’s owned by your marketing team, as they possess the contextual knowledge to align metadata operations with business objectives. No matter how flawlessly the IT team takes the requests and quickly serves up the data, if the data isn’t what the customers expect or need, it doesn’t matter. Your marketing team is the kitchen team transforming ingredients into a meal (i.e. applying metadata to assets to enrich them and make them usable for all).  

But that doesn’t get your IT team off the hook. Continuing the metaphor, if your service is terrible, you’ll consider your restaurant experience a flop no matter how good the food is. If your order is incorrect (you get the wrong data), your service takes too long, or your meal is cold (i.e. out-of-date data) you will probably look elsewhere for what you want. That means users will bypass the system you want them to use if it’s not providing the experience they want. 

Let’s not forget that there are times when the IT and marketing teams will have to work together outside of managing and completing day-to-day requests. To finish the analogy, imagine a restaurant that wants to start using food delivery apps to increase the output of meals (available assets). In setting up the apps, the wait staff is ultimately responsible for arranging the systems to reflect the restaurant’s offerings. To accurately configure the apps, the kitchen must provide them with information such as item descriptions, allergens, and cook times (their business requirements). Meanwhile, the wait staff can take inventory of their current supplies and order the necessary supplies for carrying out to-go orders (additional tools for the marketing team to best use new systems). If either party does not actively participate in the process, it could lead to a disappointing experience, not just for each other, but also for the restaurant’s guests (system users). 

With the sophistication of today’s CRM and DAM systems, it’s fair to expect a lot when it comes to performance and integrations. If your IT team gets the initial deployment correct you should never even have to think about those things again. But for as long as your system is live, your marketing team will need to manage the metadata for your content and assets to ensure they continue to remain relevant as long as your systems are active.   

Do you have too many (or too few) cooks in the metadata kitchen? Are customers too frequently sending their orders back? At Salt Flats, we can help. If you’re interested in learning more, contact us so we can whip up some solutions together.