What Is Metadata (and Why It Pays Your Bills)?
Metadata is “data about data.” In retail, it’s the semantic layer that gives meaning to transactions: department, sub-department, brand, size, pack, margin band, replenishment class, lead time, promo flags. Without clean metadata, your dashboards are beautifully wrong — attractive, responsive, and misleading. The department file wasn’t just messy; it was ungoverned metadata masquerading as truth.