Components to manage party data quality

Party data quality management can be seen as a closed loop iterative process that is ideally implemented as part of an enterprise data governance framework. The reality is many different components to manage party data quality are implemented in many places in an enterprise. Different sets of components utilizing different technology producing different results! Control over the logic that drives the components and the process the components plug into is the key to successfully resolving and managing the meaning of customer data across the enterprise. Implementing customer data integration as a horizontal service layer in a loosely coupled architecture over time (is the holly grail that) creates the infrastructure capable of controlling the business logic that in turn ensures customer data is integrated consistently with high quality across the enterprise.

• Standardize: The beginning of the process to reconcile party data from disparate sources without common definition or keys is to rigorously process all the attributes that describe people and legal entities. Standardize means to strongly type or assign correct labels to all the piece parts of name, location, contact methods and other attributes associated with people and legal entities.
• Match: The assignment of a group key to more than one instance of a person or legal entity found in source data is accomplished through a matching and record linkage process. This is a well understood statistical problem working with data where there is no reliable key available to link records from different sources that describe the same entity in the real world.
• Enrich & Survive: The set or group of records that all describe the same person or legal entity then needs to be processed to best characterize the entity. Enrichment extends the view of the person or business by appending data from a reference source. For example, Dun & Bradstreet and Acxiom are often used to extend the view of legal entities and individuals. Survivorship is the process to combine the data from a group of records into a single best representation for a particular business purpose.
• Manage Hierarchies & Matching Exceptions: The matching process has three outcomes from the comparison of two records. The two records describe the same entity in the real world – Match; or the records describe different entities – No Match. The third case is the gray area in between, often referred to as clerical review. These are cases where there is enough evidence the two records may represent the same party and the process is to have a business person review the information and make a decision. The use of clerical review is often driven by business context - not necessary for marketing promotions but essential to consolidating financial accounts or patient records. Another area for active business participation is the management of hierarchies. Hierarchies are a special type of relationship between parties that enforces parent – child relationships between records with a designated "ultimate parent" at the top of the hierarchy.
• Process Updates: The output of this continuous process to manage party data quality needs to be posted to the database management system that stores all the data about the information entity. Process updates includes the creation, update and deletion of data related to parties.
• Report & Manage Quality: Includes formal reporting and the governance processes to understand, improve and monitor the quality of party data.

Push-button customer data integration