As we all know there is sometimes a need to pay for subscriptions to external reference data authorities. Ideally, all touchpoints with external reference data, including subscriptions, will be the accountability of a central Reference Data Management (RDM) Unit. However, we are still at an immature stage of data management in general in most enterprises, and RDM usually fares worse than general data management.
What this means in practice is that staff in the enterprise may independently purchase subscriptions with external reference data authorities. In order to do this, they will often need to involve the enterprise Procurement function, which has to approve, and often manage, all purchases.
Given this, what can RDM do to prevent unauthorized subscriptions to reference data? One approach is to work with Procurement to identify requests for the purchase of reference data. Ideally, this will be done in conjunction with Data Governance, who will be very interested in any purchases of external data they are unaware of, not just reference data. Data Governance and RDM should work with Procurement to identify all requests to purchase data, and further identify all requests to purchase reference data. A good way to do this is to implement a formal partnership agreement between Data Governance and RDM on one hand and Procurement on the other. In this way the units can work together to prevent the proliferation of unsynchronized and non-standard reference data. It will not prevent all such problems, but it will reduce them.