Enterprise Data Management Architecture

With Spectrum™ Technology Platform, you can build a comprehensive enterprise data management process, or you can use it as a more targeted solution. The following diagram illustrates a complete solution that takes data from its source, through data enrichment and data quality processes, feeding a master data management hub which makes a single view of the data available to multiple business applications.



Data Discovery

Data discovery is the process of scanning your data resources to get a complete inventory of your data landscape. Spectrum™ Technology Platform can scan structured data, unstructured data, and semi-structured data using a wide array of data profiling techniques. The results of the scan are used to automatically generate a library of documentation describing your company's data assets and to create a metadata repository. This documentation and accompanying metadata repository provide the insight you need before beginning data integration, data quality, data governance, or master data management projects.

For more information on the Spectrum™ Technology Platform Data Discovery Module, contact your account executive.

Data Integration

Once you have an inventory of your data landscape, you need to consider how you will access the data you need to manage. Spectrum™ Technology Platform can connect to data in multiple sources either directly or through integration with your existing data access technologies. It supports batch and real time data integration capabilities for a variety of business needs including data warehousing, data quality, systems integration, and migration. Spectrum™ Technology Platform can access data in RDBMS databases, data warehouses, XML files, flat files, and more. Spectrum™ Technology Platform supports SQL queries with complex joins and aggregations and provides a visual query development tool. In addition, Spectrum™ Technology Platform can access data over REST and SOAP web services.

Spectrum™ Technology Platform can trigger batch processing based on the appearance of one or more source files in a specified folder. This "hot folder" trigger is useful for monitoring FTP uploads and processing them as they occur.

Some of these data integration capabilities require a license for the Enterprise Data Integration Module. For more information, contact your account executive.

Finally, Spectrum™ Technology Platform can integrate with packaged applications such as SAP.

Data Quality/Governance

Data quality and data governance processes check your data for duplicate records, inconsistent information, and inaccurate information.

Duplicate matching identifies potential duplicate records or relationships between records, whether the data is name and address in nature or any other type of customer information. Spectrum™ Technology Platform allows you to specify a consistent set of business match rules using boolean matching methods, scoring methods, thresholds, algorithms and weights to determine if a group of records contains duplicates. Spectrum™ Technology Platform supports extensive customization so you can tailor the rules to the unique needs of your business.

Once duplicate records have been identified, you may wish to consolidate records. Spectrum™ Technology Platform allows you to specify how to link or merge duplicate records so you can create the most accurate and complete record from any collection of customer information. For example, a single best-of-breed record can be built from all of the records in a household. The Advanced Matching Module is used to identify duplicates and eliminate them.

Data quality processes also standardize your data. Standardization is a critical process because standardized data elements are necessary to achieve the highest possible results for matching and identifying relationships between records. While several modules perform standardization of one type or another, the Spectrum™ Technology Platform Data Normalization module provides the most comprehensive set of standardization features. In addition, the Universal Name module provides specific data quality features for handling personal name and business name data.

Standardized data is not necessarily accurate data. Spectrum™ Technology Platform can compare your data to known, up-to-date reference data for correctness. The sources used for this process may include regulatory bodies such as the U.S. Postal Service, third-party data providers such as Experian or D&B, or your company's internal reference sources, such as accounting data. Spectrum™ Technology Platform is particularly strong in address data validation. It can validate or standardize addresses in 250 countries and territories around the world. There are two modules that perform address validation: the Address Now Module and the Universal Addressing Module.

To determine which one is right for you, discuss your needs with your account executive.

While Spectrum™ Technology Platform can automatically handle a wide range of data quality issues, there are some situations where a manual review by a data steward is appropriate. To support this, the Business Steward Module provides a way to specify the rules that will trigger a manual review, and it provides a web-based tool for reviewing exception records. It includes integrated access to third-party tools such as Bing maps and Experian data to aid data stewards in the review and resolution process.

Data Enrichment

Data enrichment processes augment your data with additional information. Enrichment can be based on spatial data, marketing data, or data from other sources that you wish to use to add additional detail to your data. For example, if you have a database of customer addresses, you could geocode the address to determine the latitude/longitude coordinates of the address and store those coordinates as part of the record. Your customer data could then be used to perform a variety of spatial calculations, such as finding the bank branch nearest the customer. Spectrum™ Technology Platform allows you to enrich your data with a variety of information, including geocoding (with the Enterprise Geocoding Module), tax jurisdiction assignment (with the Enterprise Tax Module), geospatial calculations (with the Location Intelligence Module), and driving and walking directions between points (with the Enterprise Routing Module).

Master Data Management Hub

The Master Data Management (MDM) hub allows for rapid modeling of entities and their complex relationships across roles, processes and interactions. It provides built-in social network analysis capabilities to help you understand influencers, predict churn, detect non-obvious relationships and fraudulent patterns, and provide recommendations.

Spectrum™ Technology Platform supports two approaches to the MDM hub. In the master hub approach, the data is maintained in a single MDM database and applications access the data from the MDM database. In the registry approach, the data is maintained in each business application and the MDM hub registry contains keys which are used to find related records. For example, a customer's record may exist in an order entry database and a customer support database. The MDM registry would contain a single key which could be used to access the customer data in both places.

The Data Hub Module provides MDM capabilities.