For example, adding a new customer or sales product is part of the standard business process.
[5] An example of externally-defined reference data is the set of country codes as defined in ISO 3166-1.
[6][7] Curating and managing reference data is key to ensuring its quality and thus fitness for purpose.
All aspects of an organisation, operational and analytical, are greatly dependent on the quality of an organization's reference data.
Without consistency across business process or applications, for example, similar things may be described in quite different ways.