The MDM Golden Record is Dead, Rest in Peace – Welcome Interpreted Interoperable Attributes

So-called golden record philosophy has dominated master data management (MDM) development activities during the recent years. Yet, this philosophy has been unable to deliver the promised solution, that is, organization-wide federation of customer, vendor, employee, product and other master data and through master data the federation of transactional data. Although significant improvements have been made, MDM solutions crafted have remained fragmented instead of being organization-wide. This article proposes that the key to organization-wide (master) data federation lies in interoperable attributes and their metadata. Two assumptions inherent in the golden record philosophy need to be revised to achieve this. Firstly, the ontological assumption needs to be that data is contextually defined instead of there being a single version of truth as the golden record philosophy assumes. Thus data may have several true meanings depending on its use context and the time of the data usage. Secondly, data management is increasingly done in open systems environments. Organizations have lost partly or fully control over their information architectures as they use a myriad of information systems and information sources developed and provided to them by vendors and other external parties. Finally, this article suggests that the interpreted interoperable attributes philosophy can be used to federate data beyond master data and transaction data internal to an organization, most notably big data.