Why Metadata Should Be The Cornerstone Of Your ECM Strategy

By Greg Milliken, President of M-Files Inc.

Experts say that the more valuable the information asset, the more metadata you’ll find associated with it, and therefore the more critical managing metadata becomes to your organization. Unfortunately for many companies, metadata continues to be an afterthought, particularly when implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) solution. As a result, many of them are missing out on the myriad business benefits that proper metadata management offers, from faster and more accurate information navigation and search, to streamlined quality control and compliance management activities to highly-improved management of workflows, business processes and access permissions.

Those who have been in IT for more than a few years know that the concept of metadata is not new. It has been used since the advent of the Dewey Decimal System in libraries for classifying and categorizing materials based on title, author and subject so that they can more easily be located on shelves. Libraries provide an early example of metadata applied in the physical form, but in our increasingly digital world, the primary purpose of metadata management remains the same: to more quickly navigate across data repositories in order to efficiently find, manage and track information.

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