Maintain master data once, use it in every tool

This article was created with the AI assistant Claude and published by Peter Hoenig.

The same people keep cropping up in my tools: customers in the accounting tool, team members on the Kanban board, responsible persons and roles in the 8EM Modeller, participants in workshops. Until now, names, addresses and e-mail addresses had to be typed in again in every tool – with the familiar result: the old address still here, a typo there, and in a third place the person is missing altogether. That is why there is now a dedicated tool for master data. You maintain people, organisations, roles, organisational units and cost centres in one place, and the other tools can take them over – if you want them to.

At a glance

• People and organisations: with address, e-mail, telephone, function and type – your own employees, freelancers, service providers, contacts at customers, suppliers and partners.
• Mapping the organisation: organisational units on any number of levels, roles and cost centres with heads and responsible persons.
• Two views: as a table for quick editing, or graphically as an organisation chart and as a relationship network.
• Analyses: key figures, people per unit, spans of control, staffing of roles and notes on data quality – as PDF and CSV.
• Import and export: lists from Excel or an address book (CSV, vCard), the customers from an accounting tool and the team of a Kanban board.
• At the click of a button in every tool: the “👥 Master data” button opens the master data directly in the respective tool; without a link, every tool continues to work on its own as before.
• Link and merge: take over existing people and roles from all tools that keep them – from the Kanban board to the systemic board – and merge duplicates; after that, the master data become the leading source.
• Free and local: free of charge, free software, the data stay on your device.

What belongs in the master data

An address list knows names and addresses. What it lacks are the relationships – and these are precisely what you need in organisational work. In the master data tool, a person belongs to an organisational unit, takes on one or more roles and reports to a manager. A unit belongs to a higher-level unit and has a head and a cost centre. Cost centres have responsible persons; contacts belong to their organisations. You set people who have left the company to “inactive”; they remain traceable but no longer appear in the selection lists.

Table or graphic – depending on the task

For quick data entry, there is a table for each type: click in a field, type, move on with the Tab key. You select the unit, organisation and cost centre from lists. Clicking on a row shows all details on the right; that is also where you assign roles, members and managers.

The graphic makes dependencies visible. The organisation chart shows the units as a tree with heads and members. If you drag a person with the mouse onto another unit, you assign them to it; a unit dragged onto another becomes subordinate to it. The relationship network shows all elements with their connections: who belongs to which unit, who has which role, who reports to whom, which cost centre stands for what. You create a new connection by dragging the small handle of one element onto another. Every change can be undone with the undo arrow.

Analysing what has been recorded

The analyses answer typical questions: how many people work in which unit, including its sub-units? Who directly manages how many people? Which roles are vacant, and who does not yet have a role? Which unit has no head, and which cost centre has no one responsible for it? Check notes point out missing e-mail addresses, possible duplicates or people whose leaving date has already passed. Everything can be printed, saved as a PDF or used further in Excel as CSV. The analyses describe your data – they do not assess people. A large span of control, for example, is a reason for a conversation, not a verdict.

At the click of a button in every tool

At the top of each of my tools there is the 👥 Master data button. One click displays the master data tool directly within the tool – you do not have to look for anything or open a second window; if you wish, you can detach it with “↗ own window”. As long as you do not link anything, nothing changes in the tool: it runs on its own as before.

Right-clicking the button also lets you switch on the field help. Then the key combination Ctrl+Space in an input field opens a selection from the master data. In fields for people and contact details – name, e-mail, telephone, address and the like – a small button also appears next to the field, and suggestions appear as you type; fields for titles, tasks or descriptions are not affected. An e-mail field receives the e-mail address, a telephone field the telephone number, an address field the address; otherwise the name is taken over. If an entry is missing, you create it directly from the selection. Because the connection is built in automatically when a tool is created, it will also be available to future tools.

Taking over and merging existing data

If you already work with the tools, you will long since have recorded people and roles – often several times and spelt slightly differently. That is why every tool that keeps its own people or roles can be linked to the master data: the ITSM tool for incidents, problems and changes, the Kanban board, the project management tool, the accounting tool (customers), the Vertriebs-Navigator for sales prospecting and the Kunden-Navigator for customer care (contacts and companies, including which company a contact belongs to) and the 8EM Modeller (employees, heads and roles of the as-is picture), as well as the coaching tools – systemic board and 3D systemic board, social atom, genogram, stakeholder map, Riemann-Thomann cross, change curve and team clock.

In the coaching tools, you decide for each figure whether it belongs in the master data as a person, as a role or not at all – after all, a systemic board or a genogram often shows relatives and colleagues of your clients who do not belong in your master data. Only the name is taken over, and a “mother” from one board is never automatically connected to the “mother” from another.

During the initial linking, the master data tool takes over all people and roles from the respective tool and marks them as “to be checked”. If you wish, entries with the same name that already exist are connected straight away. Then it is your turn: the “🔗 Synchronisation” view shows all entries still to be checked, together with their origin, and suggests similar names – for example “Kim Sommer” from the accounting tool and “K. Sommer” from the Kanban board. With “⇢ Merge”, you merge person X into person Y and choose for each field which value remains. The crucial point: the connection to the tools is not lost in the process. Tickets, Kanban cards, draft invoices and links in the 8EM model that were previously attached to X are then attached to Y; invoices that have already been issued naturally keep their details. You confirm entries that stand on their own with “✓ checked”.

After that, the master data become the leading source. You maintain names, initials, contact details and role assignments in one place only; in the tools, these fields are read-only, and a button next to them opens the entry in the master data. If you create a new person or role in a tool, it automatically ends up in the master data – again as “to be checked”, so that no duplicates arise. If there is already exactly one entry with this name there, it is connected instead of being created anew. If you delete an entry in the master data, it remains in the tool but is no longer linked.

My tip: link one tool first, tidy up the list, and only then add the next one. And only merge entries when you are sure that it really is the same person.

Where the data are stored

The tool runs entirely in your browser. The master data are stored in this browser’s storage on your device; all tools opened from the same location find them there. You can also save the master data as a file – as a backup or for another computer. Linking also stays on your device: which person in a tool belongs to which master data entry is recorded in the file of the respective tool. Nothing is transmitted to me or to anyone else.

Master data are personal data. So record only what you actually need for your work, no special categories of personal data such as health data, and delete entries that are no longer needed. Depending on the purpose, the people concerned must be informed about the processing.

Relation to the 8-Level Model

In my 8-Level Model, the organisation – units, roles, responsibilities – sits on the seventh level, between the processes and the tools & IT systems. It supports what is designed above it in terms of strategy and workflows. Clear, well-maintained master data make visible who is responsible for what, where roles are vacant and where people carry too much on their shoulders. In this way, they provide good occasions to ask the guiding question of my work: Does it serve people?

The tool is an aid for maintaining and analysing your own master data. It replaces neither a personnel administration system nor a data protection review. Please back up your data regularly.

Conclusion

Master data are unspectacular – until they are missing or contradictory. If you maintain them properly in one place, you save time and avoid errors in every other tool. The master data tool is free of charge and available as free software under the GPL: Open the master data tool. A fictitious example shows all functions before you enter your own data. If you would like to give your organisation and its administrative processes a clearer structure overall, I will be glad to support you with IT-supported organisational consulting. Talk to me in a free initial consultation.

Sources: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Art. 5(1) (principles, in particular data minimisation) and Art. 13/14 (information obligations). – vCard format, version 3.0 (RFC 2426).