Enterprise Data Management Architecture

Master Data Management

The Master Data Management 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.

Context Graph stores and accesses model data in a graph database. This allows users to visualize structures and relationships between entities. Users may also search the contents of models by entering natural-language queries and browsing the results. Users thereby gain insights unavailable to traditional table-based numeric analyses.

Data Enrichment

Data enrichment processes augment your data with additional information. You can base enrichment on spatial data, marketing data, or data from other detail sources. 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. You can then use your customer data to perform a variety of spatial calculations, such as finding the customer's nearest bank branch. Spectrum Technology Platform allows you to enrich your data with a variety of information, including geocoding (with the Spectrum Enterprise Geocoding), tax jurisdiction assignment (with Spectrum Enterprise Tax), geospatial calculations (with Spectrum Spatial), and travel directions between points (with Spectrum Spatial).

Data Quality and Data 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, you can build a single best-of-breed record from all of the records in a household. Spectrum Advanced Matching 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 Spectrum products perform standardization of one type or another, Spectrum Data Normalization provides the most comprehensive set of standardization features. In addition, Spectrum Universal Name 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 Dunn and Bradstreet, 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. Spectrum Universal Addressing performs address validation.

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, Data Stewardship provides a way to specify the rules that will trigger a manual review, and it provides a web-enabled 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.

Spectrum Data Discovery and Spectrum Data Profiling

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 about the Spectrum Data Discovery or Spectrum Data Profiling, contact your account executive.

Data Integration and Federation

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 Spectrum Data Integration. For more information, contact your account executive.

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