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Business Data types and relationship 

In any data related project, it is critical to understand the business data categories, relationship between Data Management and Governance. These are business data types and different from technical data types used in IT design and Architecture of the data models.  

  1. Master Data 

Data that describes business context to the transaction/events. Master Data can be classified into two sub-categories Entity Structure Master Data, Transaction Structure Master Data.  

   2. Entity Structure Master Data 

As the name suggests refers to the master data defined at the entity level. e.g., Organization, Business Units, Chart of Accounts. They are critical for the data accuracy and are stable compared to Transaction structure data.

   3. Transaction Structure Master Data 

Refers to the Master data at the transaction level. e.g., Customer, Product. This identifies the transactions and provides attributes like ownership, what got transacted. 

   4. Reference Data 

Refers to the data the defined commonly used codes, attributes about master data like customer or country hierarchy and can be both internal and external.

  • Internal Reference Data- Customer, Product, Country of CoA Hierarchies.

  • External Reference Data - ISO Country Codes, SWIFT payment Codes, Currencies, Time Zone, Industry Classifications, D&B Classification.

   5. Transaction/Events Data 

This is the  record of the transaction or event which could be financial or Operational at a point in time. These transactions are usually ‘measured’ and ‘reported’ to know the results or progress.

  • Financial Transactions- Sales orders, Purchase orders, Invoices, Payments etc.

  • Operations Transaction - Production Data, Employees/Students Attendance, Project status, Workflow approvals etc. 

   6. Transaction History Data

 Most of applications maintain a system history table that records the changes every time a transaction is created, modified, or deleted. These ‘history’ transactions record the context(who, when, where and what) attributes to the transactions based on  predefined configurations. 

What is the difference between Data/Information Management and Data Governance? 

Data/Information Management is the act of creating and maintaining these data in the normal course of business. Data Management is done by the transaction owners and includes data users who may be responsible in some ways for maintaining the data. This is done by the operations and line employees responsible for the daily operations.

Data Governance on the other hand is the act of making sure (oversight) of the data management function by defining and monitoring the rules, standards, and metrics. The rules and policies will be around, data identification, classification, life cycle, quality, privacy, and security. This is done by DG team separate from the information management function. 

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