There is a game called Chinese Whispers or Broken Telephone or some other names. In that game, one person whispers a message to another person. The message is passed through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group. At that point the message is often quite different or very shortened. The reasons for that is human unreliability including how we put our own perceptions and filters into a message.

When working with data quality you often see the same phenomenon when data is passed through a chain. One area I have observed in recent years is within Product Information Management (PIM). Here the chain is not just the data chain within a given company but the whole data chain in ecosystems of manufacturers, distributors, retailers and end users.

While Product Information Management (PIM) solutions and Product Master Data Management (Product MDM) solutions – if there is a difference – address the issues within a given company, we haven’t seen adequate solutions for solving the problem in the exchange zones between trading partners.

From what I have seen the solutions that upstream providers of product data work with and the solutions that downstream receivers of product data work with will not go well together.

Consequently, I am right now working with a solution to end Chinese whispers in product data supply chains. Check out the Product Data Lake.