When Michael J Fox gets into the DeLorean and heads back to 1955 in the first installment of the classic movie Back to the Future, he gets a rude awakening when he sees what a wimp his dad is. With the DeLorean time machine equipped with the Flux capacitor he was able to participate in the past, ultimately defeating Biff and making some serious changes. The result was that when he returned to the present, things were dramatically different and as it happens, very much in his favor.
With MDM data stewards are often challenged with examining the history of a golden record and determining what combination of matches and merges, or how the changes from various contributing sources resulted in the combined data being presented today. This capability is not only important for audit and compliance purposes, but it has serious ramifications if merges were executed, automatically or manually, resulting in an incorrect golden record.
Take a classic example in the life sciences industry, where many MDM systems are not equipped to handle a common scenario whereby a father and son work together as physicians in a shared practice. Their names are Dr. John Smith and Dr. John Smith Jr. operating (pun intended) at the same address with no further distinguishing identifiers. Without fine grained match rules to specifically handle these instances, these two unique records might get merged together by inferior MDM systems. The result, Jr. gets absorbed into Dad’s info or vice versa. Furthermore, the MDM system may not be able to provide the necessary audit and history trail to allow an “undo” correctly, since many other activities may have taken place since the actual consolidation event.
What would Marty McFly and Dr. Emmett Brown do in this case? They would probably fire up the DeLorean and arrive back at the exact point in which the original merge took place and they would be able to prevent the records from ever merging, thereby altering history and the present state. Unfortunately, for MDM it isn’t that “simple”, because additional valid activities may have taken place to contributing records which may want to be preserved. So changing history is not the right thing to do. The correct MDM, and compliant way, is to determine where the merge took place. Ideally using a point of “view” visual timeline to navigate to the relevant point-in-time details, perform the necessary analysis and apply the correct unmerge. All while preserving all the historical updates made to the individual records where appropriate, from the comfort of a desk, alleviating the need to hop into a DeLorean and risk electrocution by trying to harness a lightening bolt from a clock tower
Now if we could only travel “into the future” by running match and merge scenarios to see how specific combinations would result in greater relationship visibility (more about this in my next post). If that were possible then just like Back to the Future, MDM is destined to be a “timeless” classic.
Originally posted on the Siperian Blog