We investigated the failure of an
IS project within a global industrial company. The challenges in the
complexity of product master data were one of the failure reasons. We
detected a research gap in how to handle master data complexity in IS
development, especially in data storage integrations. The tradi-tional
approach is to define so-called golden records, “single versions of
truth”, for each record, and then harmonize and cleanse data so that
only or mainly golden record values will be used. We offer federative
approach as an alternative to the golden record approach. According to
this approach data interoperability is achieved by identifying shared
attributes, by federating data on the basis of shared attributes’
metadata, and by developing IS functionalities to process the metadata
and their cross-references. We compare the ontological stances of the
approaches theoretically and with figures. We present the results of a
case, where the federative approach was probed. Our study contributes to
re-search by showing how to link data management to IS development to
address the complexity of mas-ter data in data interoperability
projects, by comparing the golden record and the federative ap-proaches,
and by showing how the federative approach can be used in real-life
contexts.