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Create a Master Data Management schema for use by govt. agencies

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What is the idea?

IBM has a solution called Master Data Management that would provide significant savings, improved performance, and better accuracy of data that agencies and departments in the Federal government need to service citizens as well as employees.
Master Data describes physical entities in the real world - such as people, organizations, products, assets and accounts. It is kept by organizations and used to control much of their operation.

Master data is the information an organization stores about the key elements (or business entities) that define its operation.  Examples are:

  • Information about people and organizations such as employees, suppliers, partners and departments
  • Information about "things" such as products, assets, services, materials, stock
  • information about contracts and agreements such as bank accounts, insurance policies, credit agreements, which explain who is using (or is entitled) to use what.

Associated with these Master Data entities are relationships between business entities, hierarchical structures to show how they are organized and classified along with histories of interaction such as audit trails.

Master data is high value information that an organization uses repeatedly across many business processes and lines of businesses (LOBs). For these to operate efficiently, this master data must be accurate and consistent to ensure good decisions. Unfortunately in many organizations, master data is fragmented across many applications, with many inconsistent copies and no plan to improve the situation.

Customers attempting to adopt a Services oriented Architecture (SOA) are having problems supporting simple services such as getCustomerDetails() because their customer data is so scattered and inconsistent that it is not possible to locate and reconcile all of the copies of a customer record on the fly. The master data needs to be corrected at source. Distributing bad data to more people only makes matters worse.

Why is it important?

With the implementation of MDM, there would be significant savings in the number of databases being used and the processes of having to sync them up continuously.  The accuracy of the data in these disparate databases would be much improved, and more real time decisions could be made with valid data.

Submitted by jpcollin (Other) on Apr 28, 2009

This idea is now closed to further comments.

Current number of stars: 3
based on 7 votes
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4 Comments

Member comment

While I fully concur with Master Data Management, and the implied Master Metadata Management, I would emphasize that no one should start talking about master data unless it is within the context of building a broad terminology where meaning and context of terms are governed. 

Master Data cannot become "master" until someone decides what preferred term, out of a collection of similar terms, will be used "in a given context".  This is all part of a terminology process. 

See the posted idea on Terminology.  Then apply the MDM technique as a specialized approach within the larger terminology sequence.

Comment from RoyERoebuck at One World Information System on Apr 28, 2009
Member comment

Change my above comment to "no one should start pursuing"

Comment from RoyERoebuck at One World Information System on Apr 28, 2009
Member comment

Regardless of whether it is IBM or any other vendor, the MDM concept is vitally important here for the success fo recovery.gov.  In essence, this is a data architecture construct that would let recovery.gov use existing data sources, dramatically reducing the burden on government, universities, and others who must submit reports.  At the same time, MDM would reduce data errors due to semantic issues and other inconsistencies in systems used by those having to submit reports.  However, deployment of MDM is not free, and consistent federal leadership would be required to deal with those would resist transparency by keeping data in customized formats.  In addition, the federal government would have to figure out an effective deployment strategy, which would involve a snow-balling effect...perhaps by requiring modification to the standard federal receivables format (at least bill presentment), the performance/results report submitted with the bill (building on or simplifying the current earned value reqt), and accounts payable data string.  This would save a lot of money all levels of govt are spending on administration and to comply with recovery.gov reporting reqts.   

Comment from maforman on May 03, 2009
Member comment

How many years will this take?

Comment from JohnCrupi at JackBe on May 03, 2009