OneData Solution for Reference Data Management

For an organization to work, decide and report on accurate information, pre-requisites include:

a. Reference data entities are maintained consistently across the organization with definitions and stewards clearly defined for the entity and individual values. Click for examples

b. Assignment of reference data entity values to the master data set is accurate and consistent across the organization.

In this section, we discuss the first pre-requisite in terms of maintaining reference data entities. Click here for a discussion on the OneData solution for Master Data management that addresses the second prequisite.

Strategic Approach

What does management of Reference Data involve, and what is the strategic approach to this critical data management challenge?

Key guidelines for keeping a consistent reference data repository in an organization include:

• Definition: Consistent definitions used across the organization, along with consistent structures and attributes.
• Structure and Relationships: Clear relationship charts and hierarchy relationships between the entities and rules for assignment. Flexibility in the definition of entities to insulate downstream applications for changes.
• Stewardship: Clear owner or steward group defined, both in terms of users and/or functions.
• Custodianship: Clear system owner(s) by entity. If multiple systems create and maintain the same entity, need to ensure mutually exclusive data sets.
• Change management process: Clear change management process (creation, update and deletions) to ensure continued quality of data moving forward.
• Visibility: Visibility into the data, definition, relationships to ensure consistent understanding across the organization. Deployment of the data based on systems that need.

OneData Solution

OneData is enterprise software for collaborative data management, used to manage data sets such as Reference Data, Master Data, and Metadata - what we at Data Foundations refer to as Standard Data.

Click to enlarge this image

OneData is easy-to-use web-based package that enables definition the objects you own, manage its values, and distribute the definition and values to other applications and users, both within and outside the enterprise. All of this occurs within the context of a centralized repository, with built-in security, workflow and change management capabilities.

Most of the typical business rules for management are handled within OneData. For very specific rules that are complex and requirement/structure specific, OneData allows for hooks into external rules invocation.

Creating or managing a reference data repository does not imply moving all the entities into one repository and then managing the entities. In some scenarios when dealing with custodianship, if reference entities are part of a more operational process and the entities should truly reside in remote repositories/transactional systems, OneData works as a reference data portal.