You can refer Data Management standards for Data entities tool as part of our Data Quality Management+ Toolkit package. In brief, an organization needs to establish universal set of standards (domain value, data models and business rules) for data entities (like customers, vendor, invoices...) ensure that there is consistency in the way we process, store and interpret our data entities.

You business partners should know all the relevant details (unless guided by confidentiality) related to your data models, domain values and business rules). This includes your sales and distribution partners, your suppliers and your IT Vendors. The benefits are as follows:

• A consistency of thought: If your sales partner knows all fields which you can capture for your sales lead, he or she will be well guided on the information he or she should collect as he generated leads. Another example is that your sales partner could adopt the similar customer_ID (say) format.
• An insight into the thinking: As your partners go through your data-models and business rules, they will be getting a good insight on how you want to manage your business and systems. For example, your supplier could get an understanding of customer servicing strategy once; he sees the customer service parameters, which you plan to store in your customer service data model.
• Consistency in data gathering: If you vendor knows the data formats which you are trying to adopt as a universal standards, he can make appropriate changes to his processes.

Some-one may ask a question, that as an organization, people do communicate the relevant details to their partners as per the business need. Therefore, sharing your data management standards in a smart way should not add much value. Our answer would be to go ahead and try it, and you will find a new level of connect with your partner. Few things can be validated by experience only. We have mentioned in our help guide for data management standards for data entities tool, that these standards should be in business language. The purpose is to ensure that business and your partners can understand and own them.