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96 Enterprise Data Governance

example, a product goes from “to be negotiated” to “opened”
once the actors responsible for the negotiation have come to
an agreement with the suppliers of the product. Whatever
the organization puts in place to allow the actors to carry out
the negotiation, the business object product must, at the
beginning of the negotiation, have a state of “to be
negotiated” and, at the end, have the state of “opened”.

Between these two states, which can be described as
business states because they are independent from the
organization, other states of an organizational nature can
appear. For example, the organization applied to a
subsidiary requires that the actor in charge of the product
negotiation obtain the validation of both the manager in the
subsidiary and at head office (two organizational states),
whereas, for head office, only one authorization is required
(one organizational state only). For the same set of business
objects’ states, it is possible to have several organizational
states which complement them according to requirements.

These states are included in the specification of the data
validation rules. For example, the modification of the
characteristics of a product is forbidden if its business state
is not “opened”. Semantic modeling requires a formal
documentation of these states and validation rules. Taking
these states into account lends invaluable support to the
success of the MDM approach:

– an improved administration of data by business
users;
– a greater reliability in the data repository;

– an efficient preparation for the integration of the
MDM system with the rest of the system.

We will cover these points, in order, in the following
sections.