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Updated December 13th - I have added a page listing samples of Reference Data
I am a Database specialist. One of the areas of great interest right now is called "Master Data Management" or MDM for short.
MDM can be defined as "A Single View of everything important in an organisation".
This usually means Customer, Products or Services, Employeees, Suppliers and so on.
One example of the problems that MDM solves is that when we are Customers, we are often identified in different ways.
For example, my name is Robert Williams and I find myself called Robert, Roberto, Robbie, Bob, Bobby, Bobbie and so on.
MDM summarises what is involved in matching all these different names and occurrences of the same Customer and recognising them as the unique individual that I am.
We could say that it identifies the same Customer among many apparently different ones.
Wikipedia says that another common example of poor MDM is the scenario of a bank at which a customer has taken out a mortgage and the bank begins to send mortgage solicitations to that customer, ignoring the fact that the person already has a mortgage account relationship with the bank.
This happens because the customer information used by the marketing section within the bank lacks integration with the customer information used by the customer services section of the bank. Thus the two groups remain unaware that an existing customer is also considered a sales lead."
The diagram conveys the idea of 6 Customers in the background with the Gold one in the front shown clearly.
Products, Employees and Suppiers could be treated in the same way.
This is shown in a Bank, but could also be in something like a Shop, cafe or a Library.
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