A popular and indeed valuable method of avoiding decay of data quality in customer master data and other master data entities is setting up data enrichment services based on third party reference data sources. Examples of such services are:
- Relocation updates like National Change Of Address services from postal services
- Change of name, address and a variety of status updates from business directories and in some countries citizen directories too
When using such services you will typically want to consider the following options for how to deal with the updates:
A: Automatic Update
Here your internal master data will be updated automatically when a change is received from the external reference data source.
C: Excluded Update
Here an automated rule will exclude the update as there may be a range reasons for why you don’t want to update certain entity segments under certain circumstances.
B: Interactive Update
Here the update will require a form of manual intervention either to be fulfilled or excluded based on human decision.
An example will be if a utility supplier receives a relocation update for the occupier at an installation address. This will trigger/support a complex business process far beyond changing the billing address.
As explained in the post When Computer Says Maybe we need functionality within data quality tools and Master Data Management (MDM) solutions to support data stewards in cost effectively handling these situations and this certainly also applies to the B pot in data enrichment.
Right now I’m working with designing such data stewardship functionality within the instant Data Quality environment.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 