Master data management (MDM) is a technology-enabled discipline in which business and IT work together to ensure uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency, and accountability of the enterprise’s official shared master data assets.
Master data is the consistent and uniform set of identifiers and extended attributes that describe the enterprise’s core entities, including customers, prospects, citizens, suppliers, sites, hierarchies, and a chart of accounts.
System of Records
A system of record is the authoritative data source for a given data element or piece of information
Established packaged applications or homegrown legacy systems that support core transaction processing and manage the organization’s critical master data. The rate of change is low because the processes are well-established and common to most organizations and often are subject to regulatory requirements. Systems of record have the longest life cycle, at 10 or more years.
e.g. ERP – Order Management
Golden\Single Source of Truth (SSOT)
The source of truth is a trusted data source that gives a complete picture of the data object as a whole
Systems landscape with Data Entity Mapping
The Difference Between System of Record and Source of Truth
- Create a SOT by compiling item attributes from the different item SORs.
- This is where a data repository helps us in delivering SOT data to business users.
- This could be an operational data store, data warehouse, or data lake.
Canonical Data Model
Use Case Scenario
Use Case Scenario
Data Migration – MDM considerations
- Plan your MDM strategy carefully for the interim period of data migration. e.g. Continue using a legacy system as the system of record until rollout for all countries has been completed for the newly introduced system
- Think about delta data migration\real time integrations to keep data in sync
- Involve relevant stakeholders to create MDM plan to specific the system of records for specific data sets. e.g. certain objects and fields are master in Salesforce, but other objects and it’s fields master in the data hub
Managing Data Conflicts
- Define a primary system that will be used for storing and managing data objects and attributes
- Consult with MDM stakeholders to establish which system acts as the SOR for various data objects, and it’s attributes. e.g. few of customer attributes SOR is Salesforce, and ERP will be SOR for rest of the attributes
- Considering using central data hub e.g. customer and\or product data hub
- Define the set of integration to make sure that data flows taking care of updated data available across the system landscape
External data for enrichment e.g. Account, Address enrichment
- MDM can leverage external data for data enrichment using third party services e.g. Customer enrichment using D & B, Address Validation service
- Consider AppExchange Product for Salesforce
Define Golden Record – Source of Truth
Data Survivorship Techniques
Trust and Decay
A trust is a factor that determines how much trust we have in data coming from a particular source. Trust may decrease based on time known as decay. Prior we start loading data in the MDM hub, we should establish trust in multiple sources which can contribute to the data to be loaded in the hub.
Validation
A validation rule determines or helps in evaluating trust scores.
Precedence
If several sources’ cell values have the same trust score, precedence rules decide which cell survives or wins. If the identical cell value comes from four different sources, the surviving cell source and value are determined by precedence order.
References:
- https://www.gartner.com/binaries/content/assets/events/keywords/applications/apn30/pace-layered-applications-research-report.pdf
- https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/master-data-management-mdm
- https://www.bmc.com/blogs/canonical-data-model/
- http://www.dbta.com/Editorial/Think-About-It/For-Data-Quality-Intelligent-Rules-Add-Value-to-the-Golden-Record-92687.aspx
- http://mdm-socialmedia.blogspot.com/2013/02/
