Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

KEEPING THE SABOTEURS AT BAY

The organizational aversion to change has been cited throughout history. In 1829, Martin Van Buren, then governor of New York, wrote in a letter to President John Quincy Adams:

The canal system of this country is being threatened by the spread of a new form of transportation known as “railroads.” ... As you may well know, railroad carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour by engines, which, in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside. The Almighty certainly never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed.

With CDI, too, there will be those who are uncomfortable with the adoption of a new—indeed, an authoritative—way to process and source customer data. After all, if CDI is done correctly, it will become the de-facto system of record for all the company’s customer data. That can mean changes in job roles and responsibility for people who have had a hand in defining or acquiring customer data. These people are likely to include:

• Application owners. This chapter has already touched on how CDI can be a boon to developers. So why wouldn’t they support it? Because many application developers have spent long hours doing the grueling work of writing data integration code from scratch. They have become reluctant experts on data integration, and it’s now a big part of their jobs. An application developer might be suspicious of technology that claims to replace ...