Metadata: What Digitization Can Tell You About Your Own Organization

One moment of truth arrives for every type of organization: the point at which you have to determine if you are meeting your goals, selling your product, making that difference that you want to make. In the digital era, these types of moments are influenced constantly by the information exchanged over the Internet. To know whether you’ve reached one of them, you need to be connected. And increasingly, to be able to recognize them, you need to have a huge amount of information about your own organization.

Metadata is exactly the type of information that your organization will need to determine if its goals are met. Metadata tells you how your internal numbers have stacked up: whether it has to do with very concrete considerations like accounting and payroll, or less tangible ones like quality of your product, the nature of your client base, etc.

Is it possible to track metadata regarding the documents you store in your office? Of course! At FileBank, part of my job is to keep track of totals regarding various aspects of each client’s account with us. I am able to tell a client about simple tallies like how many boxes of which type they have stored with us, but also which boxes are ready to be destroyed and when, whether the organization will be regularly producing more of the content of those boxes, or whether the majority of the organization’s collection is to be permanently stored. All of this type of information classifies as metadata.

FileBank’s analytics software also takes advantage of metadata, except it takes the numbers on the documents themselves – accounting tallies, for example – and analyzes these numbers to perform numerous types of financial forecasting that will help your business stay ahead of the curve. Our software shows you the precise type of information you need to be prepared for that moment of truth. It arms you with the knowledge to face any situation your organization might encounter, especially an economic one. With the nation’s economy seemingly stuck in a permanent state of volatility, it is knowledge that is sure to come in handy.

So I hope you too will start to embrace metadata in your workplace. Using it will not only put you ahead of the curve in terms of technology, but it will also make the results from your work that much more potent.

Until next time,

Vanessa Banti
Master Archivist