As we now know, the golden record, or single source of truth, is essentially a data record where the definitive source of information is stored in order to orchestrate business operations. Users should be able to view a golden record to see the correct version of a piece of information. While the definitive source of information for users may well be the golden record, integration of associated systems may be responsible for the updates to that data, or pushing golden record data updates to those associated systems, as explained in the previous section.
Golden records may not necessarily contain every piece of information held across all systems in the enterprise but may instead contain the identifiers necessary for the retrieval of that information. As Salesforce architects, it is our job to determine where the line is between which information should be held inside and outside of Salesforce, depending on whether Salesforce is where the golden record resides. Some information should be inside Salesforce, where it makes sense to master it in there; other information, that needs to be surfaced in Salesforce but not necessarily to live on the Salesforce platform, should be pulled in as necessary upon viewing.
When designing the golden record, think about the users, what data they need access to, and when. Process-critical data should be brought into the Salesforce platform, but data that won’t be frequently accessed or reported on can be shown on-demand from an external system when required.
For example, a customer record for a bank may exist as a Person Account in Salesforce, and associated with it will be the actual bank account records in a separate system. Depending on the system landscape and how those other systems are interacted with, the identifiers for those separate bank account records may be located in one of the following:
When determining where the golden record will reside as part of an MDM strategy, consider the following:
Remember the diagram in Figure 3.1 from the Introducing MDM section? We’re going to use that conceptual overview of a golden record as our requirement to be explored using several implementation techniques that follow. Look at that diagram in Figure 3.1 again before moving on.
In our conceptual scenario, we want data from these three different systems to be brought together to form a golden record of our customers. Taking the golden record residency examples introduced at the start of this section, let’s look at how those differences would be represented.
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