An often overlooked factor in the success of information management projects is the need to be able to understand the sources of data at a fundamental, metadata level.

Typically these sources have significantly differing data models and so consequently their metadata can either be easily accessible and understood; or complex and virtually impossible to find and navigate without appropriate tools.

In the case of the latter, the challenge this presents can put projects at risk of delay, overspend or even non delivery.

The presentation will discuss the importance of metadata to effective transformation projects and explore different levels of metadata complexity.

In addition to providing customer examples demonstrating how data models from the most complex systems can be exploited to accelerate delivery and improve data quality, the talk will introduce Safyr, Silwood’s metadata discovery tool, and outline how it enables improved productivity through rapid source data model access and analysis.

Key topics will include:

• The importance of metadata to data transformation projects
• Metadata complexity
• Case studies - exploiting application metadata (Boeing and Hydro Tasmania)
• Safyr - fast, effective complex metadata discovery, analysis and delivery