Master Data Simplified

Business Story

Cindi is owner of a company UC Tram Inc. One of the trams of her company runs between cities Utrecht Central and Papendorp in Netherland. Papendorp, an apparently less congested city near Utrecht Central, has a lot of office buildings and an international school. There is a park & ride (P+R) near the tram stand of Papendorp. A lot of people, who comes to Utrecht central from other cities, choose to park their car in the P+R and avail a tram to commute to and from the Utrecht central. It's needless to say people working in the offices at Papendorp and the students studying in the school also avail the tram to commute.

On regular days a lot of passengers of different age group gets into the tram, swipe in their travel card to check in. Passengers swipes out their card to check out at the time of getting down from the tram. UC Tram Inc. offers a green card with 30% discount to students with special discount. Adult Passengers are offered a Blue Card which doesn't have this discount.

One day Jack, an IT guy from Operations department, was analysing the CCTV footage from the tram. He discovered an adult passenger every day swiping in a green student card. Suddenly a lot of questions pops up in his mind. Is UC Tram Inc loosing revenue because of improper use of Cards? Is it legal for that passenger to use a student card? By the way how a student card has been issued to an adult customer?

There are separate departments in UC Tram Inc, namely Finance, Legal and IT to handle this kind of situations. Jack informed his colleagues in all 3 departments. The IT Department opened a case to investigate green student card is issuance incident. The Finance department created another case to investigate total loss of revenue due to this incident. The Legal department also created a case to take action against this passenger.

Data Story

Let's take a pause here to identify some data type and data associated with the above business story.

In the world of data, an entity is described as a thing about which an organization collects information. An entity can be thought of as the answer to a fundamental question – who, what, when, why or how or to a combination of these questions.

On conceptual level there is a Product entity of type Travel Card with two specialization, Green Card and Blue Card. A customer entity with two specialization Student and Adult. We see a Collateral entity, the Tram. There is mention of entity Employee. Customer and Employee both a human beings, are they different entities? Let's consider, yes they are.

From perspective of data, the Collateral Tram runs between Utrecht and Papendorp. Customers of specialization Student and Adults onboards and offboards the Collateral tram. They swipe in and out the specialized Products, Green card and Blue card. The Employee entity works on the business processes relating to their business domain. Each domain encapsulates same entities Customer, Product and Collateral.

An entity which is relevant for more than one department in an organization is called Master data entity. A special care needs to be taken to govern the master data so that organization can get optimal value of it.

In our business story, Operations, Legal, Finance and IT department recognize a person who onboard the collateral tram as 'Customer'. A Customer can be of only two specialization 'Student' and 'Adult'. A Customer can have only one of the Product, Green Card and Adult Card.

Though employees from different departments working on their specific business processes, basically they are working towards the same incident being identified by Jack from Operations department : A Customer of type Adult is swiping Green Card Product in the Collateral Tram.

Therefore all the entities being identified above can be categorized as Master Data. A master data management discipline in an organization enables everyone in an organization to speak, analyse and report in same language about most common business data elements. This creates harmony of understanding. Therefore decision making and hence taking actions go much faster.

In general the business processes also encapsulates some data elements which is specific to a domain/department only. For example, in our business story the legal department has opened a case to take action on the Customer. This process might encapsulate the legal data, like address of nearest police station where a FIR can be logged, an FIR number if the incident is reported to police station. These data is not relevant for business processes in the IT and Finance department. Therefore, even after being critical business data element for the organization Police Station Address, FIR Number do not fit in the category of Master Data.

Disclaimer: The business story is a story.