Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

HOW IT WORKS: CORE FUNCTIONALITY OF THE CDI HUB

The role of the CDI hub is to deliver customer data to any system that requests it. While this sounds simple enough, there are several functions that are necessary to support the processing and delivery of customer data. They include:

• A single point of data retrieval

• Consistent value representation

• An accurate and repeatable means of merging data

• A repository of clean, reliable customer data

• Support of multiple data sources

Single Point of Data Retrieval

Among the CDI hub’s most straightforward benefits is that it provides application developers with a single point of customer data retrieval. Developers don’t need to become experts on the multitude of operating systems, storage technologies, and data retrieval standards that are part of most IT infrastructures. They only need to understand the content and interface details of the CDI hub. After all, the number of interfaces associated with packaged and custom-developed application systems can be staggering (Java Database Connectivity [JDBC], Web services, proprietary application programming interfaces [APIs], Component Object Model [COM], Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition [J2EE], etc.) and impractical to track or manage. It becomes cumbersome, and sometimes downright impossible, to maintain a development team with the necessary combination of skills to build interface code that can tie together applications from dozens of disparate systems. Practically speaking, ...