KPI Services

Meta Data Development

Metadata has traditionally been an afterthought in the BI domain. While business users should not have to care where data comes from, they want to be absolutely sure that numbers match from scorecard to detailed report, from one department to another, or from one system to another. As business intelligence has entered the mainstream, it has become crucially important to understand what makes up the information being exposed. More and more BI systems deployed ever more broadly both inside and outside organizations, make it more critical than ever to understand clearly what data terms such as “Revenue”, “Head Count”, or “Customer” really mean. This is especially true for systems that deliver broad BI capabilities: enterprise reporting, multidimensional analysis, dashboarding and scorecarding, alerting and event management. For systems built around such wide-ranging capabilities, it’s essential that all users – department heads, directors, analysts, knowledge workers, business leaders, and executives – can access the data via a common business view and understanding of the organization’s data assets. Even with metadata definitions in place however, it is still necessary to know where they are being used. Then, developers can see which reports might be affected if the definitions change and can understand the impact of the change. BI tools are only one piece of an organization’s metadata puzzle. Metadata is also generated in modeling tools, ETL tools, data base tools, and scheduling tools. Traditionally, this metadata has not been able to converse and interact. In order to make all their metadata work together, organizations often enter the same metadata into multiple systems, or have multiple metadata versions for various BI tools. This almost always results in manual, error-prone rework. Consistency is one of the greatest challenges in metadata administration. As companies grow, language and geographical issues also make global coverage problematic. Most reporting solutions support only a single language due to the limitations of the metadata capabilities. Companies supporting a multilingual environment must develop and deploy multiple metadata layers. This increases the cost of maintaining the environment. It also poses a significant challenge in maintaining multiple environments and ensuring that each is synchronized. Metadata administration is a typical limitation of many traditional reporting tools.

Cognos metadata lets you create a single metadata model that spans all enterprise data sources and applications. This gives you a consistent data view across the enterprise, and a common foundation for information sharing on an enterprise scale.

KPI consultants will allow IT to isolate report authors and report consumers from database complexities. Cognos metadata leverages your investment with a single model serving multiple audiences and locales. IT can set up enterprise standard business rules for data coming from multiple sources. Data reaches the business users in an easy-to-understand format.

KPI accomplishes this through Cognos architecture that isolates the business rules from the data sources and the end applications. A single model can create multiple packages specific to individual needs. You can import from all major modeling tools (such as Informatica, ERwin, and others). In addition, Cognos lets you conduct an impact analysis to identify resulting changes in your metadata and import just these changes into the source model.


KPI consultants can help you build an optimum Meta Data layer across all your data sources.