MDM at the Movies – Hierarchy & relationship management example: Six degrees of Kevin Bacon

What relationship does Jennifer Aniston have to Pierce Brosnan?

The answer can be found at the end of this post (no peeking!). To get there we will explore the links and references, known in Master Data Management (MDM) as hierarchies and relationships, stored in a hub or repository. A quick MDM primer before we get going. In MDM, Master data is brought together from disparate siloed sources (such as CRM, ERP, Financials) and fed into a hub. The MDM platform (like Siperian customer (disclosure my former company) Initiate, Kalido, IBM, Oracle and others) cleanses (correcting any errors in address, spelling etc) and then matches the data based on business rules according to the organization. The goal is to find related records and and to “link” together the best version of the data available. As a result of matching and linking to records across an organization, interesting relationships can now be discovered through visualization or reports for business benefit.

To illustrate this point, I will use a “Muckety Map” widget and our Jennifer and Pierce question.
www.muckety.com is a website where you can go to get latest news and information. The site provides unique visualizations of relationships and networks through their Muckety Maps. Just like MDM for individual corporate business data, Muckety illustrates how relationship data can be visualized and navigated, in this case based on entertainment movie data. So back to our question, What relationship does Jennifer Aniston have to Pierce Brosnan? There is more than one path or answer but for this example we will leverage Kevin Bacon as the tie in.  Let me set you on your way and see if you can use your movie knowledge, or your navigating skills to find the answer. BTW no using Google 🙂 or the Muckety search, you can if you want, but where would be the fun in that?.

As you can see I’ve focused the Muckety Map to start with Kevin Bacon. I’m sure you have heard of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, whereby it is claimed that any two actors can be linked together via Kevin due to the sheer diversity and volume of movies he has appeared in. Start by expanding (double-clicking) the 27 Actor box, below and you will see the movies Kevin Bacon has starred in. Your first task is to find the movie that he and Jennifer Aniston appeared in. I’ll leave the rest of the searching on how this ties into Pierce Brosnan to you. Once again the answer at the end of the post, so don’t scroll too far yet.

Unlike the read only Muckety Map that you played with above, relationships and hierarchies in an MDM system can be modified by data stewards, who can “end date” relationships, establish new ones and make edits and corrections as needed to improve the quality of the data. The relationships can signal new business opportunities, for example an insurance firm could discover other members of a household for which car insurance might be needed. The term “householding” is typically used to describe this level of discovery. Or it could be used for corporate counterparty management, for example a large Siperian customer (again disclosure my former company) is able to use MDM and relationships to ensure the optimal level of reserves to hold in case of counterparty default. Knowing a smaller company’s corporate parent who may have a better rating might affect how much is held in reserve, thereby freeing up capital which is a significant ROI on its own. As you can see, relationship management is just another benefit or MDM, but it all starts with accurate master data and a platform to bring everything together.

Now for the answer to the Jennifer Aniston, Pierce Brosnan relationship question:

–Jennifer Aniston starred in “Picture Perfect” with Kevin Bacon ->
-Kevin Bacon starred in Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks ->
-Tom Hanks was the Executive Producer for the movie Mamma Mia ->
-Pierce Brosnan starred (and sang badly) in Mamma Mia

BTW you can do a direct search on Muckety for Jennifer Aniston and Pierce Brosnan and you’ll get a different, more direct, but boring path not involving Kevin Bacon.

I hope this post was enlightening as well as entertaining. Now if I can just get the music to Footloose out of my head …