Liliendahl on Data Quality

Yesterday the Danish Ministry of Finance announced an agreement between local authorities and the central government to improve and link public registers of basic data and to make data available to the private sector.

Once the public authorities have tidied up, merged the data and put a stop to parallel registration, annual savings in public administration could amount to 35 million EUR in 2020.

Basic open data includes private addresses, companies’ business registration numbers, cadastral numbers of real properties and more. These master data are used for multiple purposes by public sector bodies.

Private companies and other organizations can look forward to large savings when they no longer have to buy their basic data from the public authorities.

In my eyes this is a very clever move by the authorities exactly because of the two main opportunities mentioned:

• The public sector will see savings and related synergies from a centralized master data management approach
• The private sector will gain a competitive advantage from better and affordable reference data accessibility and thereby achieve better master data quality.

Denmark have, along with the other Nordic countries, always had a more mature public sector master data approach than we see in most other countries around the world.

I remember I worked with the committee that prepared a single registry for companies in Denmark back in the 80’s as mentioned in the post Single Company View.

Today I work with a solution called iDQ (instant Data Quality) which is about mashing up internal master data and a range of external reference data from social networks and not at least public sector sources. In that realm there is certainly not something rotten in Denmark. Rather there is a good answer to the question about to be free and open or not to be.