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Vol. I · No. 251
Mon · 8 Jun
A Daily Lexicon of Trustworthy Data
The Lexicon

006·31

master data management

/ˈmæs.tər ˈdeɪ.tə ˈmæn.ɪdʒ.mənt/ - n.

1 [colloq.] A program funded to decide who owns 'customer', staffed by everyone who is certain it is not them.Keep. Punchy.This is the problem.

Working definition

2. The discipline and tooling that govern master data — its definitions, stewardship, survivorship rules, and distribution — to keep core entities consistent.

Filed
Seen in the wild · 3
See also
  • data stewardshipA responsibility added to a job description, never to a calendar.
  • golden recordThe one true version of the customer, assembled from five wrong ones by a rule no one in the room can recite.
  • master dataThe handful of nouns the entire company depends on and no single function will admit it owns.
  • survivorshipThe logic that picks which of three addresses is real, optimized so the survivor is always the one entered most recently and least correctly.