A practical checklist for master data management
It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Run through this the next time master data management comes up.
Numbers get quoted in meetings long after anyone remembers how they were calculated. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
The checklist
- Two systems with different customer records will disagree at the worst moment
- Decide which system is authoritative for each entity
- Reconciliation is cheaper than arbitration later
- Someone is named as the owner
- There is a date to review it again
What is actually at stake
Two systems with different customer records will disagree at the worst moment. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
The short version
Most data problems are ownership problems that turned into technical ones. Three things worth confirming about master data management before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Two systems with different customer records will disagree at the worst moment — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.