Metadata goes Mainstream

President Obama referenced 'metadata' in a recent speech to describe the type of data that the National Security Agency (NSA) was analyzing in its ongoing battle against terrorism. You can view the New York Times video on below or on YouTube. Putting any privacy and politics viewpoints aside, this revelation is a major milestone or coming out party for metadata.

What is metadata? While the term is ambiguous, it simply means data about data. In the NSA case, the President describes metadata as a way of correlating patterns with phone numbers that are originating overseas.

Is metadata some new technology? No - businesses of all types have been using metadata for decades, but only in the last several years have they been able to really harness its potential with the emergence of the data center and its expansion to store and analyze more and more data. Ultimately, this data enables businesses to deliver a better, more personalized customer experience for their online or in-store shoppers.

The rise of the cloud where everyone and everything is being connected along with the ever increasing advances in processor, server, networking and data center technologies has led to many innovations in the business world. There’s an insatiable appetite for data by businesses and consumers with data consumption and access growing exponentially year over year.

I can recall countless client meetings, where business unit leads referred to themselves as ‘big data’ or ‘metadata’ geeks. Think about why infographics are so compelling. It’s the visual representation of data. In a society where information is king, it’s all about how fast you can access and leverage information to achieve a competitive advantage.

With the right tools, we can analyze metadata to provide us with insights that can lead to increasing our customers’ bottom-line, expanding their share of voice or even providing important feedback for new innovations to come. Whether you’re combing through metadata in a business database or analyzing social conversations on Facebook and Twitter for a client, we are surrounded by and using metadata every day. It just took the President to call attention to metadata and the important role it plays.