Data governance - Concept
Master data
Core shared information about important things such as customers, products or locations
What's it for?
Gives different systems one consistent set of core facts about things such as customers and products.
For example…
Every system uses the same customer number and legal name.
Customer name, product code and office location are master data because many different processes and systems reuse the same core facts
Think of it like…
The official staff directory everyone copies from, instead of each team keeping its own address book
Often confused with…
- Golden recordThe single trusted version of a record after duplicates and conflicting information have been resolved
- Reference dataStandard lists of values used repeatedly to keep data consistent, such as countries or statuses
- Transactional dataRecords created by day-to-day business events such as purchases, payments, bookings or shipments