Exploiting external data is an essential part of party master data management as told in the post Third-Party Data and MDM.
External data supports data quality improvement and prevention of party master data by:
- Ensuring accuracy of party master data entities best at point of entry but sometimes also by later data enrichment
- Exploring relationships between master data entities and thereby enhance the completeness of party master data
- Keeping up the timeliness of party master data by absorbing external events in master data repositories
External events around party master data are:
- When someone moves to a new address as examined in post The Relocation Event
- When someone moves to another world as told in the post Undertaking in MDM
- Heaps of other changes in big reference data
Updating with some of these events may be done automatically and some events requires manual intervention.
Right now I’m working with data stewardship functionality in the instant Data Quality MDM Edition where the relocation event, the deceased event and other important events in party master data life-cycle management is supported as part of a MDM service.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 
Hi Henrik
I totally agree that each of these events needs to be effectively managed, especially in utility companies.
However, they need to be fully and effectively managed as part of the everyday operations of the enterprise. Someone in the the enterprise ought be tasked with carrying out a particular Business Function or Process, which when done properly, will result in this data always being correct.
The ‘Data Steward’ approach is only required when enterprises are not properly executing their core Business Functions and lumber some poor sap with the thankless task picking up the pieces.
Truth is, if an enterprise has data stewards, then it does not have preventative Data Quality.
Kind regards
John
John, the thesis about smooth running business functions don’t need data stewards is interesting. However I like to think this about The Future of Data Stewardship.