Reference data is a key aspect of any application integration. Today, many enterprises have no centralized enterprise governance and management over reference data. Reference data variations and inconsistencies can be a major source of data quality issues within the enterprise and can cause business losses through system downtime, incorrect transactions, and incorrect reports. IBM® InfoSphere® Master Data Management Reference Data Management Hub (InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub) is designed as a ready-to-run application that provides the governance, process, security, and audit control for managing reference data as an enterprise standard, resulting in fewer errors, reduced business risk, and cost savings. This IBM Redbooks® Solution Guide highlights the value of this powerful solution and describes how to implement it in your organization

Reference data refers to data that is used to categorize other data within enterprise applications and databases. Reference data includes the lookup table and code table data that is found in virtually every enterprise application, such as country codes, currency codes, and industry codes.

Reference data is distinct from transactional data and master data. Transactional data is the data that is produced by transactions within applications; master data is the data that represents the key business entities that participate within transactions. Reference data is also distinct from metadata, which describes the structure of an entity. Transactional data, master data, and reference data, when combined, comprise the key business data within an enterprise.

Most enterprise applications contain reference data, built into code tables, to classify and categorize product information, customer information, and transaction data. Reference data changes relatively infrequently, but it does change over time, and given its ubiquity, synchronizing reference data values and managing changes across the enterprise is a major challenge (Figure 1).


Figure 1. Reference data is found everywhere


Did you know?

Reference data has been part of enterprise applications from the beginning of the modern computing era. However, despite this fact and the fact that it constitutes a fundamental class of enterprise data, there is relatively little focus on reference data and its importance as an enterprise data asset.

Ad hoc management of reference data without a formal governance policy can create significant operational risk. For many enterprises, reference data is a major contributor to enterprise data quality problems and has a high support cost. The demands of complying with national and international industry regulations are causing companies to rethink reference data management, and compelling enterprises to manage and control their reference data by using sound data governance principles. IBM® InfoSphere® Master Data Management Reference Data Management Hub (InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub) is an ideal solution for reference data management.


Business value

Today, many companies have no centralized enterprise governance over reference data; critical reference data is managed using spreadsheets and manual, ad hoc methods. The difficulty of managing change across the complex web of reference data variations is not systematically addressed; errors in reference data mappings and inconsistencies are accepted and tolerated as an everyday reality. Reference data variations and inconsistencies can be a major source of data quality issues within the enterprise and cause business losses through system downtime, incorrect transactions, and incorrect reports.

InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub provides a robust solution for centralized management, stewardship, and distribution of enterprise reference data. It supports defining and managing reference data as an enterprise standard. It also supports maintaining mappings between the various application-specific representations of reference data that are used within the enterprise. The InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub supports formal governance of reference data, putting management of the reference data in the hands of the business users, reducing the burden on IT, and improving the overall quality of data used across the organization.

By centrally managing and distributing reference data within the enterprise with InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub, organizations can realize the following benefits:

• Reduce the risk of incorrect values
• Automates publishing to consuming systems.
• Provides controls and audit of changes made.
• Provides automation for manually intensive processes.
• Reduce IT costs
• Supports removal of redundant systems used for storing reference data.
• Reduces integration cost for point-to-point application management for reference data.
• Reduces cost to modify reference data fields.
• Improve business intelligence (BI) reporting and regulatory compliance
• Automates mapping and trans-coding for reference data being provided to the data warehouse.
• Improves warehouse data quality for BI reporting and reporting for regulatory compliance.
• Agility in modifying value quickly
• Automates process to streamline update of consuming systems
• Reduces authoring time and effort for making changes to reference data
• Reduces release cycles for data integration project initiatives

• Role-based user interface with security and access control, including integration with LDAP
• Management of reference data sets and values
• Management of mappings and relationships between reference data sets
• Importing and exporting of reference data in CSV and XML format through both batch and user interface
• Versioning support for reference data sets and mappings
• Change process controlled through configurable lifecycle management
• Hierarchy management

• Importing or authoring reference data from source systems
• Managing changes to the reference data in an orderly fashion
• Distributing the reference data to downstream systems

• Banking: Banks face the challenge of distributing reference data changes to downstream applications and then assessing what applications are impacted by a reference data change. The subscription model of InfoSphere Reference Data Management Hub makes it possible to assess what applications are impacted by a particular reference data set change.
  
  In European countries, you can choose a version of the NACE industry classification codes unique to the country as the national standard. Banks with operations in multiple countries must manage individual national NACE code sets and reconcile the differences across countries. The InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub solution allows different versions of the NACE codes to be managed from a central point, thereby simplifying the creation of mappings among different versions and supporting transcoding values across the data sets.
  
• Healthcare: Healthcare is a highly integrated industry with many different organizations working together to provide services to patients. Doctors, hospitals, plan providers, and insurance companies must all work together and communicate effectively in order to provide a high quality of service to patients and ensure correct billing and payment processes. Code Classifications such as ICD-9 and ICD-10 identify specific diagnosis and clinical procedures on claims, encounter forms, and other electronic transactions. InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub supports central management of healthcare code sets and the mappings between them so that changes to these code sets can be managed over time. In addition, proactively managing the mappings between codes within applications and transactions, and the reference data codes used within the data warehouse, can result in greatly enhanced BI and statistical reporting, vital in order to compete effectively in the highly competitive healthcare space.
  
• Cross-industry: Loading data into a data warehouse or an MDM hub typically requires reconciling reference data from multiple sources. InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub supports the loading and publishing of reference data map files for batch and load jobs.

• Master Data Management
  The InfoSphere Master Data Management (MDM) Custom Domain Hub hosts the reference data domain, but the core server itself has some other interaction patterns with MDM. In particular, InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub interacts with MDM for the following key functions:
• Management of MDM code tables
• Management of maps used to import data from different sources into MDM
• Management of maps used to export data from MDM to target systems
• Runtime transcoding of reference values used in transactions from bespoke systems that create, update or retrieve data from MDM
  
• MDM and SAP
  IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management Server is the repository that centralizes and manages the organization’s critical master data entities such as customer, product, supplier, and more. It provides reliable and flexible delivery of the master data for SAP applications. The InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub is used to import the MDM-specific values and the SAP-specific values, define mappings, and export the mappings to create the transcoding tables that are read within the Enterprise Service Bus mediation flow.
  
• Taxonomy Management for Enterprise Content Management pattern
  In Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems, taxonomies are used to classify content to make it easier to find in content delivery systems. InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub can be used as a component in an enterprise taxonomy management solution for content management and delivery.
  
• Data warehouse
  Data warehouses are used as the enterprise repository for business intelligence data. Reference data plays three key roles in a data warehouse environment:
• Providing a consistent canonical definition of reference codes to be used in all tables in the warehouse. Having the reference data defined in InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub, and then pushed into the warehouse, enables consistency and governance around reference data dimensions.
• Delivering a well managed set of hierarchies for reporting and analysis. Many reports are interactive and hierarchical in nature. You can use InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub to ensure the consistency, integrity, and governance of that hierarchy before the hierarchy is published to the warehouse.
• Ensuring that reference data from source systems is mapped to the common canonical reference data used in the warehouse as part of the ETL process. InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub is ideal for managing the sets associated with the different source system and the warehouse, and for empowering business data stewards to create the maps and version them for the mappings between the sources and the warehouse.

• IBM Offering Information page (to search on announcement letters, sales manuals, or both):
  http://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/index.wss?request_locale=en
  On this page, enter InfoSphere MDM Reference Data Management Hub, select the information type, and click Search. On the next page, narrow your results by geography and language.

• IBM InfoSphere MDM Reference Data Management Hub Sales Manual:
  http://ibm.co/12DX0sU

• IBM InfoSphere MDM Reference Data Hub Information Center:
  http://bit.ly/1072u0X

• IBM InfoSphere MDM Reference Data Management Hub Product page:
  http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/mdm/reference-data-management-hub/


• IBM Redbooks publication: A Practical Guide to Manage Reference Data with InfoSphere MDM Reference Data Management Hub, SG24-8084:
  http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedpieceAbstracts/sg248084.html