Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

DELINEATING THE BOUNDARIES OF CDI

As early as it is in its life-cycle, CDI is already a subject of heated debate among industry analysts and vendors. Common criticisms are that CDI encompasses too many disciplines to be specific and that emerging CDI vendors don’t have sufficient customer references under their belts. (Both of these criticisms were valid in the past, but no longer.)

The main criticism of CDI is that it’s nothing new, but rather a repackaging of existing technologies and functions under a brand new rubric. It’s true that in many ways CDI relates to a number of IT concepts, including:

• Business process integration

• Data integration

• Data warehousing

• Service-oriented architecture (SOA)

• Extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL)

• Data cleansing

• Householding

• Business intelligence

• Data governance

Let’s start off with a formal definition of CDI:

Customer data integration (CDI) is the collection of processes, controls, automation, and skills necessary to standardize and integrate customer data originating from different sources.

The problem is that most businesspeople are aware of their customers only within the confines of their own business processes. For instance, the marketing organization may not have a view of—or care about—a customer’s service requests, just as the call center may not include order date as an important element in its customer database. At our clients, we regularly discover multiple customer databases across a company’s ...