Having seen countless hours spent in frustration begging for metadata from transactional systems Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and DBAs I have two words for those planning a large system implementation “MANDATE METADATA!!!”, this is really easy to do and should be easy to get from either the ERP implementation team or your develpment team if you have decent professionals as counterparts (thanks God that is the case in my current implementation!).
For our PeopleSoft implementation I participated in a rather large group of people that conversed over four meetings about the data conversion process and how to use excel spreadsheets to capture column and table metadata as well as conversion details with the least expense and overhead to those in charge data conversion.
Let’s look at some of how this will work:
For technical metadata we will capture target and source table and column description and comments on excel spreadsheets along with any mappings from code table to code table so that a crosswalk would exist for codes values in the old system (lets say “A”) to code values in PeopleSoft (let’s say ‘A001′).
For conceptual metadata I still think we have a lot of work to do but I’m planning to have a conversation with the awesome HR implementation manager this coming monday so that we can start thinking of conceptual business definitions and update metadata sub categories for our HR subject area.
