Managing Hardware Assets › How to Reconcile › Data Normalization

Data Normalization

Data normalization is a step in the reconciliation process where you establish a list of rules to standardize, organize, and consolidate data between the product and discovery repositories. Normalization reduces, eliminates, and consolidates redundant data that is imported into the product from multiple sources, such as purchase order products, human resource products, procurement products, the Data Importer, and so forth.

When you normalize data, you reduce the time and effort necessary to manage the data. You also reduce the possibility of the user selecting the incorrect information when defining assets, models, and other objects, and when generating reports. The product guides you through the normalization process, enabling you to perform it much more efficiently and accurately. The consolidated discovery data is then reconciled with your owned assets during the reconciliation process and can be reported on using the reconciliation reports.

You normalize three of the fields that can be used as asset matching criteria: company, operating system, and system model. These fields are normalized because they often have multiple values that represent one normalized value. For example, the discovery tool may find many variations for the name of one company. You normalize all the variations to one value for the company name and include the normalized company name in asset matching criteria. These fields are normalized so that you can include them in asset matching criteria.

The Hardware Reconciliation Engine normalizes the data that is imported into the product by referencing the following normalization rules, which you define:

• Company normalization rules
• Operating System normalization rules
• System Model normalization rules

Example: Normalize Company Data

In this example, when you import company data into the product using CA Client Automation, multiple variations of Document Management Company are discovered in various formats, including the following values:

• Document Management Company
• Document Management Co
• Doc Management Company
• Doc Management Co

To help users select the correct company when defining an asset and model and when generating reconciliation reports, you define company normalization rules to map all variations to Document Management Company. During the reconciliation process, the normalization rules map the values as follows, before an asset is updated in the CA MDB:

Note: A collected company that is mapped to an authoritative company affects Hardware Reconciliation only if the collected company is a discovered company.