Data Classification

Lets take a look at what 'Data' is comprised of for any enterprise. Consider a hypothetical company "Orange" with 30,000 stores worldwide, 40,000 employees , operating in 10 different countries, manufactures and sells around 15,000 varieties of products via different direct and indirect sales channel, having around 10,000 direct customers , procures various raw and finished products from 1500 suppliers across the globe. These staggering number of employees, location, products, customers,suppliers and various other,  represents facts or information about real world objects. For this organization 'Data'  is representation of these real world objects. Data can represent virtual objects as well. Lets go through this illustration of a very common online shopping experience which involves data representing data from both worlds.

1.  End customer logs in to online shopping portal.
2.  Selects and configure the right product.
3.  Initiate checkout process

• Provides shipping address.
• Provide payment details.
• Confirm the order.

4.  Customer receives email confirmation with order tracking number and estimated delivery date.

The entire process involves data flow from one point to another and finally halts with shipment of product. Product,customer,location etc represents real world objects but information about order,invoice,receipt which are shared between two points in electronic format are transactional in nature and represents virtual objects. A pictorial representation and data captured in the online shopping is below :



In essence data for any enterprise can be classified in following major categories :

Non Transactional(Master Data) Data :

Non transactional data represents critical nouns for any business and generally provides information about person,location,things and concepts. Non transactional data are very common classification of data which exists across all industries Retail,Manufacturing,Engineering,Oil,Pharmaceutical etc.

Transactional Data :

Transactional data is related to sales,invoice,receipt,claim etc. and other monetary and non monetary interactions.

Data About Data (Metadata) :

This is data about another data and contains details like data type(character,number,date etc ..), comments about data etc. and are generally maintained in some kind of repository.

Unstructured Data :

This is data found in various formats floating or maintained in variuos formats like email,website.white paper, legal and marketing collateral etc.

Analytical Data

As the word 'Analytical' suggestes , it assists company's decission making. Analytical data comprises of various forms of data assembled into a one giant data warehouse or multiple data marts to help enterprise make wise and intelligent decission which might impact the sale, reduce cost, identify latency in supply chain.

Data servicing a milestone task

I landed on a MDM assignment few years back and within a period of six months realized the importance and enormous complexity involved in a MDM initiative. MDM initiative is  not just about deploying and confugring a third party software or even write your own(if you have patience, time and money to do so) but it also involves adherence to standards, practises and principles. And also deals with transformation of human mind set and change in perception towards 'Data'. 

In todays world, enterprise are relying on combination of homegrown softwares which are written and matured over a period and also specialized third party softwares to perform specific function supporting variuos business like sales & marketing ,finance, operations, HR, supply chain, customer relation,service etc. All these complex systems are interlaced together and relies on various kind of data which flows from one application to other in various formats and provides desired optimization to business.

I still remember buying my first car few years back and along with it came a booklet mentioning various 'service' options available and schedule for it. And each time my washed car came out of the service station it felt like it got a a new life. Buying a new car was a great decission and timely maintenance of it  is imperative for smooth run and longitivity. For any IT project which involves development, configuration of an application and various data conversion and enrichment activities and once application and data are married it brings the desire output for business. And similar to the Car , MDM initiative is a great decission and timely servicing  of  both application(software,hardware) and data is imperative. To be successfull with MDM initiative a task must be created for 'Data Servicing' to undertake following  :

Both IT and business engagement is very critical for a success of this task and it should be a recurring task in MDM project plan.

Tell me somthing about yourself

"Tell me something about yourself ...." A predictable way to initiate an interview. How many times you were grilled with this question during a job interview. I'm no exception ,10 years back someone (VP of a software company) asked me this very question at start of  my first job interview before being brutually slaughtered for 55 mins. with dumb questions on LIFO , FIFO concept of Data Structure , Bubble & Merge Sort Algorithm , FKs/PKs/ Referential Integrity contraints in RDBMS . And my unsaid response was  "Whatttt... Why the hell he's showing personal interest on me .. ..". Later, I realized that this is one of the most infamous question asked during various levels of interview and few desperate candidates don't even hesitate to spend few bucks to go through some preparatory courses to respond to such questions which were never taught in school.

So here it goes ..  a 20 yr. old lad in heart with 10 yrs of experience and growing everyday. Came from a very humble middle class Indian Bong (Bengali .. yes .. you'll find a Bengali in a fish market in any part of the world and probably bargaining over the price just below the "No Bargaining Please"  hanging.) family in Assam(Recently I realized that it's one among 20 plus states in India and we don't need passport to travel to cities like Bangalore,Delhi and it has concrete Roads and even few airports. ). Thanks to my parents, Baba(I still address my father with utmost respect as Baba and not "Dad" or 'Buddha') in particular who has vested lot of interest in my studies and eventually after rigorous 21 years of hard labor (I used to cycle 1.2 miles everyday even in cold winter morning at 5:00 am for tuition , believe me , not cycling its getting up early morning @5 is lot of hard work ) without any miscarriage , ended up as bachelors in engg. Lost my bachelorhood to a very sweet "Axomiya" girl in May-07, and happily married thereafter to "Sweety" , my wife. By the way both of us are more comfortable speaking in Hindi and not Bengali or that matter Assamese (Sign of diversification and multiculture aspect which is quite common in India now a days .. 21st century affect)

As far as profession is concerned , spent almost 8 delightful years working for a major(giant like "Whale") software company in Hyderabad (Land of Reddy's and Naidu's , well known for Hyderabadi Biryani, it really taste yummy and now a days served with a coke .. though i love it with "Mirchi Ka Salan " and at least one member of each family from Hyderabad is settled abroad, otherwise you are considered no good and people speak a distorted version of Hindi which is supposedly our national language )and now leveraging my knowledge gained (thats the best part of working for a established and reputed company, they make you learn quickly and heftily pay for that) and currently working as a consultant, implementing packaged solution mainly ERP. My current area of interest is MDM aka. Master Data Management. I'll try to cook some MDM articles in this blog which can be gulped easily .