• The Master Data Governance Committee, the Master Data Management Committee and the ICT unit should set up a project with organizational structure and resources adequate to implement the institution’s master data system.
• The Master Data Management Committee should specify the requirements for the master data system. The following considerations should be taken into account:
• Concerning architectural aspects, the implementation should follow the defined architecture and an SOA approach. The system should provide service-oriented interfaces and use SOA-oriented middleware to facilitate access across and outside the institution;
• Concerning the contents, the system should use reliable identifiers, especially for persons, as well as reference data (e.g. activity and geographic codes, etc.). The system should manage data versions, keeping the values for slowly changing objects, such as persons changing family status and address, or companies changing sector of activity. In turn, the criteria for moving active data to historic databases should be defined;
• Concerning operations, the system should implement data management operations including CRUD and should support online transactions and provide master data to decision-support systems (i.e. data warehouses and business intelligence tools).
• The scope of the data objects to include in master data constitutes one of the main types of functional requirements. Based on the preliminary scope, defined as recommended in Guideline 2, IT governance processes, the following data types may be included in the master data:
• Persons, including basic data and specific data corresponding to their different relations with the social security functions (employee, beneficiary, contributor, etc.), family and household-related links;
• Employers, including basic data and the contribution collection balance if relevant for other areas of the institution;
• Labour records (employee–employer relationship, employee’s monthly salary).
• The ICT Governance Committee, with the assistance of the ICT unit, may conduct the elaboration of a detailed design of the master data model and the metadata.
• The ICT Governance Committee, with the assistance of the ICT unit, should conduct the corresponding buy-or-develop analysis to choose the most appropriate option.

Several master data products are available on the software market, which should be customized to the social security domain.