Reference Data - A Case Study

This is a case-study on the six-year journey of building support for and implementing an enterprise solution for managing reference data. The Association has siloed applications, each with independent efforts at collecting and managing third party and proprietary reference data. This approach resulted in redundant staff efforts as well as redundant costs for data procurement with no improvement to the overall data quality and basic trust in the data. While there was no disagreement that the siloed approach was flawed, gaining support and budget for a consolidated approach proved elusive until the Association decided to ramp up data analysis across the silos.

This presentation will detail the approach the Association followed for selecting a tool, consolidating reference data from various silos, identifying data stewards, designing workflows, and promoting the results.

Identify data inconsistencies to key business leaders
Identify fragile processes for maintaining data consistency of common Reference Data
Buy instead of build
Build bench strength - Data Stewards, tool power-users
The champion may be you

Diane has studied and worked with data for the past 30 years. She designed logical and physical data models and managed the evolution of systems for SPSS, American Hospital Association, ACNielsen, Discover Financial Services, University HealthSystem Consortium, and Experian. She is currently an Enterprise Architect for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. She has functioned as a Database Administrator in mainframe DB2 and SQL Server databases. She is also experienced with system design, having designed and managed the implementation of MAPPware, a web-based Strategic Management tool. Diane has designed Performance Measurement systems for Discover Financial Services, the Iowa Soybean Association and the National Restaurant Association. Diane has a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Purdue University; a Master’s degree in Rehabilitation Counseling from SIU; a Certificate in Computer Programming and an MBA from DePaul University.