The flood of data flowing through today’s organizations has made it nearly impossible for employees to find what they need without help from information management professionals. You can proactively provide that help by effectively managing metadata and indexing.
If you’re confused about the terms “metadata” and “indexing”, you’re not alone. The terms are often used interchangeably, but they’re not the same. In this post, we’ll explore how they differ from and complement each other, and how you can use them to improve your organization’s retention, compliance, and search capabilities.
Metadata is data about the data. It usually includes fields such as a document’s format, the date it was created, its authors, the access and compliance rules governing it, and its retention code. You can also add custom metadata tags, such as a company’s name for a project, for example.
By giving documents context, metadata enables you to automate processes—including document destruction at the times specified by regulations. That feature alone makes it invaluable to document management professionals, especially in fields like finance or healthcare, where information is subject to multiple rules. And for any business sector, automation demonstrates proof of compliance, speeding audits.
In addition to easing regulatory compliance, metadata can help you enforce your own internal access and governance rules, automating business procedures like routing and approvals. Employees really appreciate capabilities like these, which allow them to concentrate on more substantive matters and get their work done faster.
In this CHIME case study, leaders from Novant Health and Morris Hospital explain how they retired their legacy systems and moved historical data into a single archive that is easier, faster, and safer to access.
Companies hire people to use their skills, but many spend hours sifting and sorting through data instead. According to a study by Gartner, 47% of digital workers struggle to find the information they need to perform their jobs effectively.
That’s where indexing comes in. It uses metadata to help you organize information in ways that align with workflows, enabling people to find what they need using search terms that make sense to them.
For example, indexing financial documents by date or transaction ID helps accountants speed reconciliation. Indexing by employee names and ID numbers helps HR professionals locate records. Indexing customer sales data and queries allows service representatives to provide instant personalized help. These are simple examples, but employees can also perform more advanced searches, filtering results by multiple indexed fields.
In a nutshell, indexing reduces the time employees spend hunting down information and increases the time they spend solving business problems and improving services. It also ensures standardization and consistency in document classification—which means teams can share and collaborate more easily.
Metadata and indexing have different functions, but they work together to create a robust platform for information management and retrieval. Without indexing, metadata would be too overwhelming to be useful. And without metadata, indexing wouldn’t work very well.
It’s kind of like a library system, with metadata specifying a book’s title, author, and genre, and indexing showing you which shelf to find the book.
Understanding the difference between metadata and indexing is important in designing an effective system for organizing and accessing information. For example, you need to embed retention codes directly into metadata rather than indexing them, since they are not typically used in search. To improve search, you need to examine employee workflows in depth, noting for your index the types of information teams collect and the terms they use to describe it.
In addition to aiding workflows, metadata tagging and indexing helps with data migration and mergers. Metadata ensures that information lands in the right place. Indexing makes information easier to find during migration, so you can make sure nothing gets left behind. After the migration, metadata (if you’ve managed it properly) contains attributes that are useful to new, as well as existing users, and indexing helps everyone quickly find what they need and hit the ground running.
Here are some suggestions to help you maximize the effectiveness of your metadata and indexing management:
Do: Periodically review your metadata and indexing strategies—especially before a system upgrade, migration, or merger.
Remember, you need to use both metadata and indexing to establish an effective system for organizing and retrieving information, and understanding the difference between them is crucial. The way you manage these processes will impact productivity, compliance, auditing, and security across the entire organization. If you are uncertain or need help, don’t hesitate to reach out to seasoned partners who can offer guidance.
To learn more about sound practices and techniques, download our eBooks about metadata and indexing:
The Role Metadata Plays in the Information Lifecycle
Boost Document Accessibility with Effective Indexing Strategies and Records Classification Methods
Share