By Stephen Putman, Senior Consultant
This posting is the first in a series discussing various aspects of the financial justification of a metadata management system implementation that are not obvious in many existing analyses. Today, we will discuss the time and effort saved by Information Technology business analysts in system implementation projects.
In a database implementation project, one of the first activities performed is the gathering of business requirements. These requirements are gathered from business users mainly by interviews and document inspection. The business analysts (and data modelers) take this information and produce documentation describing these requirements, and often perform data mapping between systems when data movement is required.
A basic function of a metadata management system is to describe data elements within computer systems and record attributes of these elements, such as the resident table(s), data types, business rules, and so on. A metadata management system makes it easy for the business analyst to gather relevant information about the existing data elements involved in the data movement in the system, and aids in the design of the data store for the new system by facilitating the data mapping exercise. These two simple uses of the repository save a tremendous amount of time and effort by the analysts in these activities.
It is a simple matter to quantify the cost savings of maintaining a metadata management system for business analysis activities by determining the time spent by staff on collecting and transcribing source data element definitions, subtracting the (very small) time spent extracting the same information from the metadata management system, and multiplying the result by the salaries of the business analysts involved in the project. This result is placed in the “return” bucket of the Return on Investment calculation. This savings is also something that continues to pay dividends over time when more projects utilize the metadata repository in this way.
This example shows that metadata management systems positively affect several areas or your IT organization that are not immediately apparent. I will be detailing more of these functions over the next few months.
Stephen Putman has over 20 years experience supporting client/server and internet-based operations from small offices to major corporations. He has extensive experience in a variety of front-end development tools, as well as relational database design and administration, and is extremely effective in project management and leadership roles.
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