Fundamentals of Metadata Management

Foreword

I first met Ole several years ago, shortly after he published his book, The Enterprise Data Catalog (O’Reilly). Sometimes, you meet someone who has an uncommon clarity of thought and a gift for making the complex feel obvious. When I invited him onto my podcast, he struck me as a deeply thoughtful and cerebral person. We’ve since become good friends, and I was honored when he asked me to write this foreword.

Ole starts this book with a story that will resonate with anyone who has spent time in the trenches of enterprise technology. He recounts meeting a chemist at a large company who showed him a seemingly endless list of IT systems, the “ITSO.” When asked what all these systems did, the chemist grinned and admitted that nobody knew. A significant portion were likely doing nothing, but turning them off was too risky. What if a factory shut down? The cost of the unknown was greater than the cost of maintaining the bloat.

This Kafka-meets-Dilbert anecdote is not an outlier. Sadly, it is the default state of affairs in most organizations. We are constantly grappling with foundational questions: What applications do we have? What data do they hold? How are they connected? The uncomfortable truth is that, often, no one can provide a complete and trustworthy answer. The problem isn’t a lack of information but a surplus of it scattered across dozens of uncoordinated, siloed systems.

Fundamentals of Metadata Management brilliantly dissects this vicious cycle, but its actual value ...