1. Survivorship
Reltio Survivorship is the process of deciding which value contributes to the golden record (OV) between the many potential values provided by the entity's crosswalks. Each attribute in reltio has a survivorship rule, if none is explicitly defined “Recency is used by default.
2. Reviewing your existing Survivorship Rules.
To review your existing survivorship settings in Reltio UI, start by navigating to a profile and selecting the crosswalk view (three arrows pointing together) on the left hand side. From the crosswalk view you can see the values provided by your various source systems under “Attribute Values” and the surviving values under “Applied Operational Values”. Survivorship is what happens in between!
The screen shot above note that the first name attribute has the (Survivorship) Rule Type of “Source System” defined.
3. Use Source System Rules.
Source System survivorship works by defining a list of source systems in a hierarchical order of priority. Reltio will check a winner among the crosswalk values available for that attribute in the order of the list.
To see how your sources are ordered start by clicking the sprocket beside the words “Source System”. From this view you are able to rearrange the list to your liking, but remember that this applies to all records with this attribute, not just the profile you are on.
4. Using the Recency
Recency is the simplest and default option of survivorship. When set to Recency, Reltio will select the attribute value with the most recent lastUpdateDate value. This a great choice data that could frequently change or go out of date.
5. Using the Oldest Value
Oldest Value is the opposite of recency. It takes the attribute with the oldest createDate value. This can be useful for things like userID. If a duplicate user were created in a source system and later merged with the original, you would likely want to preserve the original ID of the user rather than the new ID.
6. Aggregation allows you to collect all possible values.
Sometimes you can’t just choose one. Addresses and other nested attributes are often good candidates for aggregate survivorship. Aggregation collects all of the unique values provided by your sources and lets them all contribute to the OV record.
7. The Frequency Rule helps in determining the winning value.
If you’re using multiple systems, the highest frequency value could help decide the winner rather than recency. This can be dangerous, though, in instances where the infrequent value is the correct one, such as when a customer prefers a nickname over a legal name.
8. Minimum and Maximum Rules.
Min Value/Max Value are good rules for numeric values. Age would be a good example, if multiple values are provided the largest is likely correct. You aren’t getting any younger!
9. Other attribute crosswalk winner
Some data only makes sense in a set. You wouldn’t want to take the area code from one source's phone number and the rest from another. Similarly you wouldn’t want to take the AddressLine1 from one address and the City from another. That address might not even exist!
This is solved with the “OtherAttributeCrosswalkWinner” strategy. You set a rule one attribute (Say Recency on AddressLine1) and “OtherAttributeCrosswalkWinner” on the rest of the pieces of Address like City, State, Zip5, etc. This tells the rest of the address to choose the same source that won for AddressLine1, keeping the Address whole.
10. Avoid stalemates with a fallback strategy.
In situations with zero winners or two winners which tie, a second survivorship rule can be added within the first to help find the winner. Any survivorship rule can be added as a fallback strategy. You can read more about fallback strategies here.
11. Overriding survivorship for one record
Survivorship rules are great for managing the vast majority of your data in an automated way, but there are always exceptions that make the rule. In cases where survivorship rules get it wrong you have two more tools at your disposal: the pin, and the ignore. The pin allows you manually select a winner and the ignore takes that value out of contention all together.
Wrapping Up
Survivorship is a core capability of Reltio, enabling users to quickly distill the value from their volumes of data. Above we covered the basics of getting started, but there are opportunities to be even more nuanced in your strategy coved in the Reltio Docs.
Learn More with the Reltio Community
The Reltio Community is a great place to learn more about how to use the Reltio products and connect with Master Data Management peers. Rely on the expertise of Reltio partners, customers, and technical experts.