Multi-Domain MDM, Santa Style

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl4 Comments

How would a Multi-Domain Master Data Management (MDM) solution look like at Santa Claus’s organization?

julemandenI think it may look like this:

Santa’s MDM solution covers all 4 classic domains:

  • Party
  • Product
  • Location
  • Calendar

Party

A main business improvement achieved through Santa’s MDM solution is better Nice or Naughty management. The old CRM system didn’t have a dedicated field for Nice or Naughty assignment, so this information was found in many different fields used during the years including as part of a street address or as a “send Christmas card” check mark. Today Santa handles Nice and Naughty information including historical tracking as a kid may be Nice one year but Naughty the next. This also helps with predictive analysis for future present demand. Ho ho ho.

Party master data management at Santa’s also includes keeping track of all the business partners as manufacturers of toys and other stuff, the shopping malls where Santa has to sit in December and so on. A given legal entity may have different roles in different business processes. For example a reindeer insurance company may also require Santa’s presence at the company’s Christmas tree family party.

Product

Product Information Management (PIM) has always been a complex operation at Santa’s. In Wish List Fulfillment (Wishful) you may have kids wishing for the same thing with different wording. The new MDM solutions flexible hierarchy management features helps a lot when the wishes are matched with specifications obtained by the purchase elves. At Santa’s they increasingly work with the suppliers in sharing complete and timely product descriptions and specifications.

Location

Handling location information relates to different locations where Santa is supposed to live be that at the North Pole, in Greenland, in Lapland or any other believes as discussed in the post Notes about the North Pole.

Also related to knowing where to deliver all the presents Santa has realized that maintaining an address as part of the record for each boy and girl isn’t the best way. Today each boy and girl record has a relation with a start and end date to a location entity where location specific information, including precise chimney positions, are kept.

Calendar

Christmas present delivery timing is crucial for Santa. In some countries Christmas morning the 25th December is the right time for the stuff to be there. In other countries Christmas evening the 24th December is the right time. Add to that doing present delivery across all time zones. Ho ho ho.

The MDM implementation at Santa’s has indeed helped a lot with Santa Quality. But it is an ongoing journey.

Right now Santa is looking for a smart Information management firm to help with defining to what time zone the North Pole belongs.

Anyone out there?

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Fighting Identity Fraud with Identity Fraud

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl3 Comments

I have earlier had issues with SEO agencies posting comments on this blog in their quest to help data quality tool vendors in getting better search rank for data quality related terms. Example here.

This happened again today with a recent post called Addressing Digital Identity.

I find it quite funny that the SEO guy is talking about fighting identity fraud while posting a comment under a name that I bet is not his/her real name:

InfoGlide SEO scam

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Some Kinds of Reference Data

Henrik Gabs LiliendahlLeave a comment

The term ”reference data” and related Reference Data Management (RDM) is used commonly in the data quality and Master Data Management (MDM) realm.

As with most terms it may be used with slightly different meanings. Usually, but not necessarily always, reference data are core data entities defined outside a given organization.

I have come across the below discussed kinds of reference data:

Reference Data in Investment Banking

The term “reference data” is well established in investment banking. Reference data are core master data entities as counterparties, securities and currencies. These are the things you deal with in investment banking. They are not made up for a given bank or other single financial institution but are shared across the whole market and should optimally be the same to every institution at exactly the same point of time.

RDMSmall Reference Data

In Master Data Management in general we usually see reference data as value lists helping describing and standardizing internal master data.

One example will be a country list. A list of countries should be the same for every organization in the world. However available lists does differ though most variations usually don’t have any business impact as the academic question about if Antarctica should be in the list or not.

A list of codes describing to which industry a given company belongs is another example of reference data. As examined in the post What are they doing? you may choose to standardize on SIC codes or standardise on NACE codes or develop your own set of codes for that purpose.

Big Reference Data

In geography a country list is in the top levels of defining locations. Further deep we may have postal code systems within each country as ZIP codes in the United States, PLZ codes in Germany and PIN codes in India. Yet further deep we have every single valid postal address eventually all over the world. This is what I call big reference data.

A way of sourcing industry codes for your customers, suppliers and other business partners will be picking from or enriching from a business directory like for example the D&B WorldBase or any other of the many business directories around. Such directories may also be seen as big reference data.

The dramatic increase in the use of social media and related social network profiles has emerged as a new kind of big reference data serving as links to our internal master data.

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Who is accountable for melting ice?

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl2 Comments

When working with data quality issues some of the big questions are: How bad is it? Is it getting worse? Can we do something about it? Who should do something about it?

These questions are basically the same as those around the changing climate on this planet including rising sea levels.

This morning I read an article on BBC news telling that several scientific teams have joined forces in an attempt to quantify exactly how it is with rising sea levels. The short answer is that the sea level now is 11.1 millimeters (7⁄16 of an inch) higher than in 1992.

The sea is rising because of melting ice primary on Antarctica and Greenland as seen below:

Ice_sheet_contribution_464

So I think it’s high time to ask the people of Antarctica and not at least the people of Greenland to do something serious about that their ice is melting and flooding innocent people in the rest of the world.

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Addressing Digital Identity

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl5 Comments

A physical address has traditionally been a core element of doing identity resolution. Stating a name and an address is the most widespread way of telling with which person or which company we are (aiming at) having a business and other form of relationship.

However, during the last 25 years a lot of things have moved from the physical world to the online world. Not at least a lot of things start in the online world while in many cases ends up in the physical world. Today selling, the smart way, starts in social media. Final delivery may be digital or may be sending a package or a consultant to a physical address. A thing like dating most often starts in the online world today but surely the aim is a physical encounter.

This new way of life has a tremendous affect on data quality and master data management. Within quality of contact data, the most frequent domain for data quality issues, we have traditionally dealt with verifying names and addresses and deduplicating names and addresses.

As the best way of preventing data quality issues is looking at the root we must address that onboarding of contact data often starts with a digital identity where a physical address isn’t present in the first place but often will be updated at a later stage.

As described in the post Social MDM and Systems of Engagement a new trend in master data management is to establish a link between the new systems of engagement and the old systems of record.

In the same way data quality prevention and improvement will have to cover establishing a link between a new discipline being digital identity resolution and the good old address verification stuff.

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MDM meets MDM

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl3 Comments

The three letter acronym MDM may mean several different things. It can for example be:

This morning I read an article on metering.com telling about that Meter Data Management varies across Europe. The article was about the different approaches that are taken in various European countries when it comes to access to and storing meter readings in the energy sector.

I noticed that these different approaches very much resembles how public sector basic data about addresses, companies and citizens are made accessible and stored in the same countries. Scandinavia has a centralized approach, some other countries have some hybrid solutions and Germany has a strictly decentralized approach.

As told in the post instant Data Quality at Work I am right now working with Master Data Management in the energy sector. These projects certainly have some bordering zones to Meter Data Management.

So it’s good to see that reading the article about MDM (in this case Meter Data Management) makes just as much sense if you thought it was about MDM (being Master Data Management):

“The most important factors for supporting and choosing a particular model are cost efficiency, transparency, data security and efficient processes. The rationale for centralized MDM also seems to be strengthened .. because of the increased amount of information exchanged.

There is also a clear understanding .. that the chosen MDM model needs clear rules regarding data access, privacy and security, while enabling proportionate access to data by authorized parties to ensure that benefits can be delivered.

As such many regulatory changes are occurring .. that .. considers that efficient and secure information and data access for relevant stakeholders is fundamental for a proper .. market functioning and customer protection and empowerment .. and indeed different countries might require different MDM models on the basis of their market design specificities.”

So, MDM is just like MDM.

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Beyond True Positives in Deduplication

Henrik Gabs LiliendahlLeave a comment

The most frequent data quality improvement process done around is deduplication of party master data.

A core functionality of many data quality tools is the capability to find duplicates in large datasets with names, addresses and other party identification data.

When evaluating the result of such a process we usually divide the result of found duplicates into:

  • False positives being automated match results that actually do not reflect  real world duplicates
  • True positives being  automated match results reflecting the same real world entity

The difficulties in reaching the above result aside, you should think the rest is easy. Take the true positives, merge into a golden record and purge the unneeded duplicate records in your database.

Well, I have seen so many well executed deduplication jobs ending just there, because there are a lot of reasons for not making the golden records.

Sure, at lot of duplicates “are bad” and should be eliminated.

But many duplicates “are good” and have actually been put into the databases for a good reason supporting different kind of business processes where one view is needed in one case and another view is needed in another case.

Many, many operational applications, including very popular ERP and CRM systems, do have inferior data models that are not able to reflect the complexity of the real world.

Only a handful of MDM (Master Data Management) solutions are able to do so, but even then the solutions aren’t easy as most enterprises have an IT landscape with all kinds of applications with other business relevant functionality that isn’t replaced by a MDM solution.

What I like to do when working with getting business value from true positives is to build a so called Hierarchical Single Source of Truth.

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Social MDM and Complex Sales

Henrik Gabs LiliendahlLeave a comment

Social Master Data Management (Social MDM) is about linking the increasing trend of doing business via social media, using what we may call “systems of engagement”, with the traditional way of supporting business using what we call “systems of record”.

Doing social MDM is a natural consequence of adapting social CRM (Social Customer Relation Management). Many CRM solutions are supporting Business-to Business (B2B) activities helping with keeping track of what’s going on with a lot of contacts related to a business account within so called complex sales processes.

Traditional MDM in B2B environments has been much about a single view of the business account and the legal entity behind. As social CRM is much about the relations to the business contacts, the people side of business, we need a solid master data foundation behind the people being those contacts.

The same individual may in fact be an important influencer related to a range of business accounts being the legal entity with who you are aiming for a sales contract. You need a single view of that. So many sales contracts are based on a relation to a buyer moving from one business account to another. You need to be the winner in that game and the answer to that may very well be your ability to do better social MDM.

Social MDM adds a new external source of reference data to MDM solutions for B2B customer master data management. This new source is professional social network profiles where LinkedIn is the most known and used service around.

It is early days for social MDM solutions so it is quite exciting for me to work with designing the first kind of such solutions around the MDM edition of the instant Data Quality service.

Stay tuned for more news in this field on this blog in the times to come.

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The Letter Æ

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl5 Comments

This blog is written in English. Therefore the letters used are normally restricted to A to Z.

The English alphabet is one of many alphabets using Latin (or Roman) letters. Other alphabets like the Russian uses Cyrillic letters. Then there are other script systems in the world which besides alphabets are abjads, abugidas, syllabic scripts and symbol scripts. Learn more about these in the post Script Systems.

Æ, which in lower case is æ, was part of the old English alphabet. For example an old English king was called Æthelred the Unready.

The letter Æ is a combined AE and is pronounced in English as the first letter in Edmund and Edward.

Today Æ exists in a few alphabets: The Danish/Norwegian, the Faroese and the Icelandic. People and places from the corresponding Viking territories  may have the letter Æ/æ as part of the string. For example the home of Microsoft Dynamics AX and NAV is the town Vedbæk north of Copenhagen. When represented in the English alphabet the town name will be Vedbaek.

So Vedbæk and Vedbaek should be a 100% match when doing data matching. And so should Vedbæk and Vedb%C%A6k when systems are as bad as Æthelred the Unready was in handling the Vikings.

And oh, Æthelred wasn’t actually unready. He was unræd meaning bad-counseled.

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My Name is Bond. Jimmy Bond.

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl2 Comments

Right now the 23rd James Bond film called Skyfall is out in cinemas. And oh yes, he does say that his name is Bond. James Bond.

There were actually some films before the current row of James Bond films based on Ian Fleming’s character. The first one was Casino Royale from 1954. This was a pure American production and herein James Bond was an American agent mostly referred to as Jimmy Bond.

There are plenty of examples around on how films and TV series are adopted for a foreign audience by changing the characters to have local names and habits.

When preparing software, including data quality tools and master data management solutions, you have the same balancing to do. Should you emphasis on the strength of the product based on a particular advantage within the country where the product is born or do you have to rewrite some features and unique selling points to make it understandable and feasible in another part of the world?

This challenge is close to me as I’m working with internationalization of the iDQ service. This service is born in a Scandinavian context where there is good availability around public sector master data indentifying and describing addresses, companies and individuals which helps with getting high quality contact master data.

But this may not resonate as well in a British context where ability to do rapid addressing and support vanity addressing may be the current hot stuff or in an American context where external reference data are much more privatized.

Technically the services will be pretty much the same, but it has to be twisted a bit and so do the story telling around the service.

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