How to maintain master data across multiple parties

Question

The scenario is simple: a number of companies need to share some reference data (let's say, a list of products and their attributes).

The problem is that currently each entity collects/cleans the data internally, then shares the data with other companies which leads to a length process of exchanging files (spreadsheets).

What are some of the modern approaches for solving this? Surely this scenario is very common in modern corporate life, so I am looking for some guidance on standard processes / technologies to look into.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is indeed a common scenario, and there are several ways of solving the problem, ranging from dedicated commercial offerings (like Tibco MDM or similar offerings from IBM, Dell/Boomi, etc) that tend to be large, monolithic master data solutions to lightweight microservices that each own a particular subset of the data and publish changes in the relevant data to the other microservices that need it. If the database technology and schemas are largely similar between companies, sometimes you can use things like replication or database log shipping to synchronize data between companies. If your data does not need to be synchronized automatically, an ETL procedure could be used to extract changes to master data from one company and load it in the others.

A near-realtime approach that utilizes Domain-Driven Design would identify a Bounded Context for each set of Master Data elements that need to be managed, such as Products. Then, each company would define their Domain Model for Products, defining a Product Aggregate that exposes the public surface of the Product and abstracts the company-specific details. The Domain Model would also define the Events that each company can publish related to their Product aggregate. If different companies own different parts of the product, they may publish changes to those fields as Domain Events to which the other companies subscribe.

The underlying repositories and data structures that define the Product in each company would be updated by a command processor that receives the changes and applies them to the company-specific domain. This can be orchestrated using an ESB, microservices, or a message broker, depending on the complexity of the processing required between companies, such as routning, transformation and translation.