You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!
Col. Jessup (Jack Nicholson)-A Few Good Men
Let’s start with a puzzle that you’re most likely familiar with:
“You are a prisoner in a room with 2 doors and 2 guards. One of the doors will guide you to freedom and behind the other is a hangman–you don’t know which is which, but the guards do know. One of the guards always tells the truth and the other always lies. You don’t know which one is the truth-teller or the liar either. However both guards know each other. You have to choose and open one of these doors, but you can only ask a single question to one of the guards. What do you ask to find the door leading to freedom?”
Now, you have a similar puzzle to solve re. your organisation data; your data is in silos with many systems holding the same data with differing values. Which system is right? You spend ages searching for information that isn’t easily accessible. You do not trust the accuracy of the data! To solve this puzzle you also have to ask the right questions.
A Single Source of Truth
A Single Source of Truth (SSOT) essentially enforces the practice of combining data from all existing systems within an organization to a single accessible location. It’s a discipline rather than a single system, database or process.
I’m familiar will the following options for achieving a SSOT:
Enterprise Service Bus
An ESB is an integration platform that allows systems to be loosely coupled. An ESB can allow many systems to get data updates from other systems. With an ESB, the numerous source systems send their data to the aggregated data system on a regular cadence and any changes in those sources (new creates, updates, or deletions) are published via the ESB.
- When a source system updates a record, the ESB can initiate flows that then update the other source systems, that store the same data, for example; an employees address is updated in the HR system, which automatically updates the ERP and payroll systems via the ESB.
- An aggregated data system is a database/repository, which is also updated by the ESB and acts as the central store of the Master Data. The central store can be used to load a dataware house/lake for reporting and analytics.
Master Data Management
Master data is a collection of common, core entities along with their attributes and their values that are considered critical to a company’s business. Examples of master data include customer, product, employee, supplier, and location data. Complexity arises from the fact that master data is often strewn across many channels and applications within an organization, invariably containing duplicate and conflicting data. Ultimately, MDM is deployed as part of the broader Data Governance program that involves a combination of technology, people, policy, and process.
…..and the answer to the puzzle; “you ask both guards which door will the other guard point to if you asked him which door leads to death.”
