Master Data Management
One authoritative record for a customer or product across systems that each have their own.
4 to work through
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intermediate
An insurer has three customer masters: one in the policy system, one in claims, one in the broker portal. Each is authoritative for something. Leadership wants one. Give the sequence that gets there without a cutover weekend.
2 min answer -
advanced
A large enterprise has customer records in a dozen systems with no shared identifier. Design the master data approach.
1 min answer -
advanced
A retailer sells the same stock through stores, its website and marketplaces. Stock counts disagree. What is the architecture problem?
2 min answer -
advanced
Several systems each hold a version of the customer record and they disagree. What is the architectural approach?
2 min answer
5 terms in this topic
Golden Record
The single authoritative version of an entity assembled from conflicting sources, and the survivorship rules that decide which value wins.
practiceMaster Data Management
Establishing a single authoritative version of core business entities that appear inconsistently across many systems.
metricMatch Confidence Band
The score range between automatic merge and automatic reject in record matching, which is where a consolidation programme's permanent staffing cost l…
practiceSurvivorship Rules
Per-attribute rules deciding which source's value wins when several systems hold a different value for the same entity - the part of master data mana…
patternUnmerge Capability
The designed ability to reverse an incorrect entity merge and restore both original records, which requires that source keys and pre-merge attribute …
Neighbouring topics
Data Governance & Semantics
General material on ownership, meaning, quality and control of data at enterprise scale.
Data Mesh
Domain ownership, data as a product, self-serve platform, and federated governance.
Data Products
A dataset with an owner, an interface, an SLO, and consumers who can rely on it.
Data Contracts
Producers committing to schema, semantics and freshness, and breaking builds when they do not.
Data Catalog
Discovery, ownership and technical metadata, and why catalogues go stale.
Business Glossary
Agreeing what a term means before arguing about which number is right.
Semantic Layer
Metric definitions held once and served to every tool that asks.
Reference Data
Code lists, hierarchies and currencies — small, shared, and quietly load-bearing.
Data Quality Dimensions
Completeness, accuracy, timeliness, consistency, validity and uniqueness as testable claims.
Data Observability
Freshness, volume, schema and distribution monitoring for pipelines that fail silently.
Data Stewardship
The operating model that makes ownership a role rather than a slide.
Data Access Models
Role, attribute and purpose-based access over analytical data, and how they compose.
Row & Column-Level Security
Restricting slices of a table rather than the whole table, and where it is enforced.
Tokenisation & Masking
Dynamic masking, deterministic tokens, and preserving joinability without exposure.
Retention & Purge
Deleting from an append-only estate, and proving the deletion happened.
Data Sharing & Clean Rooms
Collaborating on data neither party may hand over, with computation as the interface.
Sensitivity Labelling
Propagating a classification through joins and derived tables so controls follow the data.
BI Governance
Dashboard sprawl, certified reports, and the number the board is allowed to see.
Self-Service vs Governed
Letting analysts move fast without four teams reporting four different revenues.