Data Management: Master Data (Definitions)

"Data describing the people, places, and things involved in an organization’s business. Examples include people (e.g., customers, employees, vendors, suppliers), places (e.g., locations, sales territories, offices), and things (e.g., accounts, products, assets, document sets). Master data tend to be grouped into master records, which may include associated reference data." (Danette McGilvray, "Executing Data Quality Projects", 2008)

"Master data is the core information for an enterprise, such as information about customers or products, accounts or locations, and the relationships between them. In many companies, this master data is unmanaged and can be found in many, overlapping systems and is often of unknown quality." (Allen Dreibelbis et al, "Enterprise Master Data Management", 2008)

"Data that describes the important details of a business subject area such as customer, product, or material across the organization. Master data allows different applications and lines of business to use the same definitions and data regarding the subject area. Master data gives an accurate, 360° degree view of the business subject." (Tony Fisher, "The Data Asset", 2009)

"The set of codes and structures that identify and organize data, such as customer numbers, employee IDs, and general ledger account numbers." (Janice M Roehl-Anderson, "IT Best Practices for Financial Managers", 2010)

"The data that provides the context for business activity data in the form of common and abstract concepts that relate to the activity. It includes the details (definitions and identifiers) of internal and external objects involved in business transactions, such as customers, products, employees, vendors, and controlled domains (code values)." (DAMA International, "The DAMA Dictionary of Data Management", 2011)

"The critical data of a business, such as customer, product, location, employee, and asset. Master data fall generally into four groupings: people, things, places, and concepts and can be further categorized. For example, within people, there are customer, employee, and salesperson. Within things, there are product, part, store, and asset. Within concepts, there are things like contract, warrantee, and licenses. Finally, within places, there are office locations and geographic divisions." (Microsoft, "SQL Server 2012 Glossary", 2012)

"Data that is key to the operation of a business, such as data about customers, suppliers, partners, products, and materials." (Brenda L Dietrich et al, "Analytics Across the Enterprise", 2014)

"The data that describes the important details of a business subject area such as customer, product, or material across the organization. Master data allows different applications and lines of business to use the same definitions and data regarding the subject area. Master data gives an accurate, 360-degree view of the business subject." (Jim Davis & Aiman Zeid, "Business Transformation: A Roadmap for Maximizing Organizational Insights", 2014)

"Informational objects that represent the core business objects (customers, suppliers, products and so on) and are fundamental to an organization. Master data must be referenced in order to be able to perform transactions. In contrast with transaction or inventory data, master data does not change very often." (Boris Otto & Hubert Österle, "Corporate Data Quality", 2015)

"The most critical data is called master data and the companioned discipline of master data management, which is about making the master data within the organization accessible, secure, transparent, and trustworthy." (Piethein Strengholt, "Data Management at Scale", 2020)