How much master data do you have?

Organisation’s are storing/creating more and more data year after year. This is an ever increasing problem. So how much master data does a typical organisation actually have? Let’s look at two examples:

Example 1/ A local government organisation for a city or a state/county. In the UK we call these county councils. Probably has a budget of about £350 million per year, would likely have at least 10 different key databases for areas such as HR, accounts, social care issues and planning. In addition to the 10 there are probably a multitude of satellite systems sitting on peoples desks or used by small teams but not probably known or managed by any central IT function, let’s assume 20.

Let’s make a few assumptions about these systems which we can used to give a sense of the data we need to worry about. If we assume each table within a database on average has 20 attributes. We can also assume that each main system has 25 tables and each satellite system has 10 tables.  This means we get the following:

Main Systems

·         No of Key Database systems = 10                   

·         No of Tables = 50

·         No of Attributes = 20                                           

·         Total number of Attributes = 10,000 (10*50*20)

Satellite Systems                

·         No of Satellite database systems = 20          

·         No of Tables = 10

·         No of Attributes = 20                                           

·         Total number of Attributes = 4,000 (20*10*20)

The grand total from all the above is = 14,000 attributes

·         Grand Total = 14,000

Example 2/ What about within a large corporate. If we make the assumption that tables are of a similar size but the different is the number of systems and the complexity of those systems (number of tables). With some estimated numbers we get something like the following:

Main Systems

·         No of Key Database systems = 25                   

·         No of Tables = 100                                                 

·         No of Attributes = 20                                           

·         Total number of Attributes = 50,000 (25*100*20)

Satellite Systems                

·         No of Satellite database systems = 100        

·         No of Tables = 10

·         No of Attributes = 20                                           

·         Total number of Attributes = 20,000 (20*10*20)

The grand total from all the above is = 70,000 attributes

·         Grand Total = 14,000

Using our two examples above we can now ask the question how much data is likely to be master data. Without going into the specifics let’s assume only 10% of our data can be classified as Master Data. This means that we get the 7,000 attributes for the large corporate and 1,400 attributes for the smaller company to worry about. Quite a lot I think?

How big is your enterprise? I would be interested in reads view on this.