Reference Data Management

Well-managed reference data is essential for an organization to accurately consolidate and report on information from its numerous organizational units and data sources. Conversely, reference data problems have the potential to cause sensitive reporting errors that are visible all the way up an organization's management levels.

Reference Data is typically classified into three key areas:

1. Stand-alone reference and mapping entities. These entities are found in almost every organization, indicative of a "type". Examples include Agency Type and Party Type.
2. External Standards: These are standards maintained externally, such as ISO country codes and ISO currency codes.
3. Hierarchies. A set of related entities, where relationships can be structured or leveled, ragged or recursive.

Two aspects of Reference Data Management need attention:

1. Reference Data entities must be maintained consistently across the organization, with definitions and stewards clearly defined for each entity and the entity's values.
2. The assignment of Reference Data entity values to the master data set must be accurate and consistent throughout the organization.

OneData is an enterprise reference data management solution for all types of reference data and hierarchies. Fully browser-based and highly configurable, OneData has an easy-to-use front end for both business and IT users, and comes with strong governance and stewardship capabilities. In addition to managing the data in its own repository, OneData can work as a data management engine on any pre-existing application or database, instantly providing a controlled stewardship and governance process for that application.

The OneData platform has end-to-end data management capabilities - including modeling, creation, maintenance and interchange. Business models may be built either in OneData or in a data modeling tool such as ER/Win or ER Studio and then imported into OneData. It's important to note that no proprietary structures are created within OneData, and the data is open to 3rd-party tools.

Sophisticated data governance capabilities are built in into OneData, with features such as fine-grained role-based security down to the cell level, a configurable workflow framework, a graphical process flow builder and a rules engine.

Hierarchy management is another strength of the software, with support for deep levels and complex structures of hierarchies including ragged/unbalanced hierarchies and nodes with multiple parents, as well as multiple types of versioning and change management. Click here to read about hierarchy management in more detail.