Mastering Transactional Reference Data

Day to day operations of the contemporary enterprise are driven by a set of critical, operational data. Typically, we think of this data as customer and product data, but there are more. Every industry has this supporting transactional data that ultimately contributes to the core objectives of any company, increased revenues and decreased costs.

Mastering this data is difficult. It resides in multiple sources. Ownership of the data presents political challenges and it is typically a moving target, changing often.
These data are all similar in characteristic and have these traits:

• State - transactional data undergoes a lifecycle of “states”. Typically we think of these states as new, pending, approved or terminated but they are native to the real life concept the data is modeling. Regardless, the state is central to the transaction the data supports and is a key trait.
• Collaboration - most transactions require interaction or collaboration between two operators (systems or people) to create or modify it and each has his role and rights in the transaction. The lifecycle of the data describes this flow.
• Complexity - typical reference data serves a single purpose as a lookup table; however, transactional reference data is not this simple. It is naturally complex in its valid forms, disparate in where it resides and changes often.

The Solution: Talend MDM

In order to provide a reliable master data to the enterprise, the solution should enable collaboration, help consolidate and complete data, increase accuracy, provide generic model, and adopt a data centric approach.
Making sense of this data, MDM provides a central repository with the necessary tools to allow the data to drive its lifecycle.

In order to make sense of this data and create a reliable master that can be shared across the organization you must first agree upon a model, outline the process and lifecycle of the data and then use an MDM tool to model and enforce policy. Talend MDM is useful as tool during the planning process as well as in production. It simplifies this difficult task. The unique Active Data Model allows you to modify the model in real time and have the various owners of the data review changes to the model, validations, workflow, user rights and translations though a collaborative interface and in real time. This iterative approach to data governance is unique to Talend MDM.