Metadata & Data Catalog Consultant

Role Purpose

The Metadata & Data Catalog Consultant helps clients make their data understandable, discoverable and governable. The role establishes practical metadata standards, business glossaries, data inventories, catalogue entries, lineage records and stewardship workflows that connect business meaning with technical assets. It supports both manual foundations and technology-enabled catalogue implementation.

The consultant works with business experts, Data Owners, Data Stewards, architects, engineers, quality specialists and platform teams to define what metadata is required, who maintains it and how its quality will be monitored. The role may evaluate catalogue tools and prepare recommendations, but client procurement and approval decisions remain with authorised stakeholders. The expected outcome is an operational metadata capability that improves discovery, shared understanding, impact analysis, quality management and trusted reuse.

Key Responsibilities

• Assess existing glossaries, inventories, dictionaries, catalogues, models, lineage records and metadata-management practices. Define business, technical and operational metadata requirements and minimum mandatory fields. Develop metadata standards, naming conventions, definitions, ownership rules and quality criteria.
• Facilitate business-glossary workshops and reconcile duplicate, ambiguous or conflicting terms. Build or quality-review dataset, attribute, system, report, interface and data-product catalogue entries.
• Document business and technical lineage and connect metadata to models, rules, controls and authoritative sources. Define stewardship workflows for creation, review, approval, publication, maintenance and retirement of metadata.
• Support metadata-quality checks, issue management, completeness reporting and periodic review. Gather functional and non-functional requirements for catalogue technology and evaluate tool options transparently.
• Plan metadata migration, onboarding, integration and adoption activities for selected tools or platforms. Develop guidance, demonstrations and role-based training for business and technical users.
• Transfer catalogue administration and stewardship routines to client teams with clear documentation.

Minimum Requirements

Education

• Bachelor's degree in information systems, library/information science, data management or a related field. An equivalent combination of relevant education and directly applicable consulting or implementation experience may be considered.

Professional Experience

• Typically 3-7 years in metadata, catalog, information architecture, business analysis or data governance. Experience in metadata management, data cataloguing, information architecture, business analysis or data governance. Experience developing glossaries, data dictionaries, inventories, lineage or catalogue content. Experience gathering metadata requirements and working with business and technical stakeholders. Exposure to catalogue platforms, metadata ingestion or tool selection is preferred.

Technical and Domain Knowledge

• Business, technical and operational metadata concepts. Business glossaries, data dictionaries and catalogue structures. Metadata standards, naming conventions and ownership workflows. Data lineage, models, interfaces and impact analysis. Metadata quality, completeness and issue management. Cataloguing requirements, tool evaluation and implementation planning. Integration between metadata, quality, master data, architecture and analytics. SQL or other data-inspection skills sufficient to validate technical metadata.

Core Competencies

• Business glossary. Metadata standards. Catalog tools. Lineage. Data modeling basics. Stakeholder facilitation. Semantic precision. Taxonomy thinking. Curiosity. Detail orientation. Facilitating definition and glossary workshops. Eliciting requirements from business and technical stakeholders. Resolving terminology conflicts through evidence and agreed governance. Producing precise inventories, dictionaries, standards and procedures. Evaluating tools without bias towards a particular vendor. Demonstrating catalogue processes and training users. Maintaining traceability between metadata requirements and delivered content.

Preferred Certifications

• CDMP Associate or Practitioner, with Metadata specialty preferred

Focus areas

• Business glossary Metadata standards Catalog tools

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