REFERENCE DATA LOW-HANGING FRUIT IN DATA MANAGEMENT IMPROVEMENT PROJECTS

Reference data, such as lists of country codes, product codes or currency codes, are everywhere in every organisation. And the larger and more complex the company, the more reference data there are. They may not be the most exciting part of Data Management but they do determine data quality and consistency of reports. Based on TIBCO EBXTM, Rabobank has consolidated its Reference Data Management and centralised. With immediate results.

DATA MANAGEMENT AS A BOARDROOM TOPIC

Following the banking crisis, authorities and regulators have imposed stricter requirements on how banks conduct their information management. ‘Thou shalt be in be in control of your data’ is the motto. At Rabobank, this has among other things, this has led to the establishment of a Data Governance Board, which reports directly to the Managing Board, and the establishment of a Data Management Office that takes care of Data Management policy and implementation within the bank. Subsequently several Data Management initiatives were launched to get a better grip on data and to increase the quality of data management. These include
including meaning, quality, lineage (the journey of data within the bank) and retention periods of data. These data management components have been prioritised because they are necessary to be compliant with external regulations. The management and dissemination of the appropriate Reference Data were less urgent but could nevertheless also be improved. “Reference Data Management may seem a ‘nice to have’ compared to other data management components but because it also affects the quality of data and reporting, it also needed to be addressed.” That says Pim van Daatselaar, Data Management Specialist at Rabobank’s Data Management Office. “Maintaining and sharing reference data required a lot of manual work, it was not formalised and there was no monitoring of data consistency. For the owners of this data, updating and distributing it was a laborious process that consisted of creating Excel lists that then also had to be mailed around. Of course, everyone did that in their own way.” Moreover, the inconsistencies led to unclean reports. Dealing with reference data therefore had to be more efficient and better. Rabobank set up a Reference Data Management Office (RDMO), with all the business processes and roles involved. Therefore, Rabobank also started looking for the right tooling to support the RDMO.