Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

FIERCE CONVERSATIONS: TALKING TO CDI VENDORS

Some important questions need answering before you embark on your CDI journey. Ideally, you should be able to answer the following questions in an informed way, with an eye toward future business needs as well as current ones. Smart CDI vendors will ask you these questions, so knowing the answers up front will be helpful not only in choosing the best CDI solution, but even in negotiating the best deal.

Q. Do you have applications and reports unable to generate a consistent customer list?

A. Some managers believe that if you require users to get their information from a central repository, it will become the de-facto single version of the truth and data anomalies will simply be fixed with time. However, the data errors originate in the source systems, so the data stays dirty.

A CDI hub is an active integration system that monitors the values from individual source systems and determines the most accurate answer based on the values available. It doesn’t rely on a static set of rules, but instead considers how recent the values are, the relative quality of data, and the best answer.

Q. Do you have more than one application requiring access to integrated, accurate customer data? What are those applications, and how do you know there’s a need?

A. It could be overkill to implement CDI for a single application that might already have hard-coded data integration. The benefit of CDI is in its economies of scale. The goal is to centralize ...