At Dhara, we have been involved with “master data” initiatives and storage mechanisms for over eight years.  We think that the master data problem can be solved once and for all with new technologies.

My personal involvement with master data began thirty years ago, although I had never heard of the term “master data” until years later.  Back in the early eighties, I was working in the supermarket IT services industry, and we were trying to arrive at a unit price for the items in a shipper, which is a floor display stand heavily used for seasonal items like cookies, make-up, suntan lotion, toys, and spices.  The problem was that the shipper’s price was tied to the retail value of one of the items.  Consequently, if all of the retail items totaled $299.99, then one of the items sharing the same product bar code would be assigned a price of $299.99, instead of its correct price of $1.99.  This occurred because the common practice at the time was for one of the items in the shipper to have a bar code with the same number that was on the external carton . 

Twenty years later, an industry initiative for data synchronization was charted so that problems like that could be solved elegantly.  It sounded very simple. It was not.  We discovered that an item’s data components could change based on the geography of the shipping point;  the retailer or distributor to which items were being shipped;  and in the case of multi-national products, the geography of the source item(s) and the shipping route to the destination.  As a result, massive amounts of money were invested in trying to solve the problem of data integrity.

In all of the other industries, like the high-tech ones, in which I worked, the problems were similar.  In addition, the inclusion of more points of distribution added complexity to the situation because third parties often did the final assembly of the products, and different third parties  might handle multiple combinations of separate components before the final item was sold to the ultimate consumer.

At Dhara, we are looking at applying the technology of the semantic plane to the problem of master data provisioning.  Each Wednesday, over the coming weeks, we are going to be exploring this topic in our Blog.  But for now we wish to convey the idea that the rules for obtaining information about a customer’s data must be dynamic and  this knowledge base must be maintained by factoring in elements such as  the quantities purchased, the available supply, and the context of use.  Other factors, such as the availability of promotional programs, time, geography, and transportation costs should also  be described in a knowledge base that can be queried.

In the 80s, being able to differentiate between a shipper versus a consumer selling unit would have provided the information necessary to determine the price.  Unfortunately, the technology to accomplish that did not exist at the time.  Since then we have had to create kludges and a whole new system of numbering standards in order to “solve” a simple problem.

If your organization still has a master data problem, and you would like to discuss it with us, please see our website at dharacg.com, or contact us by email at info@dharacg.com

Fred Geiger