Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

SOURCE SYSTEM DATA: PERSISTENT STORAGE VS. REGISTRY ACCESS

It’s clear from the overview of CDI hub functions that the technology is highly focused on data integration. We’ve used the term integration to mean all the details associated with creating a holistic and complete view of the customer: data retrieval, cleansing and transformation, value standardization, and merge processing. The actual integration process, however, can occur one of two ways within the CDI hub: data is either preintegrated and persistently stored or integrated “on the fly” and merged as it’s retrieved from the individual source systems. We talked about each of these methods in Chapter 2, and will now cover the benefits and trade-offs of each approach.

How the Persistent Style Works

The persistent style of CDI hub stores both the identification details of the customer as well as the descriptive attributes. This information is retrieved and processed from each of the source systems, with the resultant details stored inside the hub. A persistent hub can process both identity-based and descriptive-based queries. An identity-based query requires only the identity details of a customer. A descriptive query includes both the identity and the descriptive details of the customer. Queries are processed by the hub without requiring any additional access outside the hub. All customer data lookups and value references can be handled locally on the hub.

In Exhibit 7.10, the client application, the customer support ...