2008 has been a year of change, with much financial uncertainty and fluctuation. This change is being felt throughout organisations; it is affecting staff numbers, sales targets, efficiency, and productivity.

Organisations are tightening their belts while striving to achieve more with less, getting extra out of existing staff and IT infrastructures. In such times, companies need to keep productivity up and manage change effectively.

The channel can help.

Data warehouses are highly complex environments, often with as many interdependent processes as traditional manufacturing environments.

Yet the process of turning data into useful information has not had the equivalent to an ERP system to assist with production planning and materials management.

Instead, the data warehouse manager or IT director has to deal with information silos for the vendor of each process involved in this transformation.

No wonder organisations struggle to answer questions like -

*whether their reports have been refreshed with this week’s or last week’s data;

*why different departments running the same report get different results;

*why all reports are affected if a specific data source becomes unavailable or a process fails, how to ensure compliance;

*and whether they can trace the origins of all feeds to a single number on their balance sheet.

It’s a complex environment. Unsurprisingly, most managers hesitate to make changes to their environment, even when the business case is solid and they accept the change is needed.

The risk of making that change is hard to understand, quantify, and manage.

The answer, we think, lies in metadata management. Metadata, in simple terms, is information about information.

In the case of an Excel spreadsheet, metadata includes information about who created the spreadsheet, when it was created and so on.

Useful stuff – but it is only when you start adding richer information, like which PowerPoint presentations have used a spreadsheet or who has recently viewed such-and-such a spreadsheet.

It can tell you which presentations need updating if you find a problem in the spreadsheet, and who you need to inform, or who has recently accessed the information.

It can also tell you which other spreadsheets use a similar formula or which should be reviewed to ensure no similar issues exist?

Metadata has been captured in database environments for years but the industry has turned its attention on capturing the linkages between business requirements, business processes, applications and data.

This holistic view, known as enterprise modelling, lets organisations react more quickly to competitive and regulatory changes.

Not only can they understand the impact of change but they can take proactive measures to reduce the risk and cost of making that change, allowing them to get new products or services to market faster.

The channel needs to be taking advantage of the changing times and using this angle for additional sales at the beginning of a data warehouse project, we think.

If a customer decides not to go ahead with a data warehouse or business intelligence project, it may be that they are concerned about the complexity.

Selling and helping your customers to implement appropriate modelling may help alleviate their concerns and prepare them to become a customer in future.

If channel partners can offer consulting around modelling, they can make additional revenue and move up the food chain as a supplier to that customer.

Andrew de Rozairo is a strategic partnerships executive at software vendor Sybase