Sarah Mattison Bernd Group

Predicting adoption requires balancing rapid data platform change with enduring governance needs. A grounded baseline, aligned to the Enterprise Metadata Management Market prediction, expects catalogs and lineage to be table stakes, with active metadata orchestrating quality checks, access, and deployment safety. Semantic layers and metrics stores converge with metadata platforms, producing consistent definitions across BI, notebooks, and reverse ETL. Generative copilots emerge for stewards and analysts, drafting terms, mapping fields, and summarizing lineage, all grounded in approved sources. Regulators increasingly ask for operational evidence—policies enforced, decisions logged—pushing metadata from documentation to automation.

Three arcs guide planning. Conservative: curated catalogs for regulated domains, manual quality gates, and periodic audits; expansion follows compliance milestones. Base: event-driven lineage, automated classification, and enforcement in CI/CD and orchestrators, with domain teams owning glossaries and policies. Optimistic: metadata-aware development where data contracts, impact previews, and policy checks gate every change automatically; real-time lineage supports operational troubleshooting and cost optimization. Risks include shelfware catalogs, fragmented ownership, and over-automation without stewardship; mitigations are productized platforms, clear roles, and human-in-the-loop review for exceptions. Portfolio hedges invest across glossary, lineage, and active enforcement to absorb variability.

Execution makes predictions credible. Stand up a term bank and owner registry; codify change workflows with approvals and SLAs. Integrate scanners and lineage early for top pipelines and dashboards. Embed policy checks into CI/CD and orchestration; measure prevented incidents and review burden saved. Train domain stewards and publish adoption scorecards. Communicate wins frequently—access approvals measured in hours, not weeks; schema changes shipped safely; audits passed with minimal lift. With these practices, forecasts translate into measurable, repeatable programs.