Foreword
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
—Albert Einstein
When Evan Levy and I wrote Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth (John Wiley & Sons, 2006), we were confident we'd chosen a topic of high business import, one with innumerable use cases and a clear value proposition. Our book was the first book published on the topic of CDI—now commonly known as customer master data management (MDM)—and it was a direct result of our having seen what had happened at companies that didn't have MDM.
Earlier in the decade, my second book, The CRM Handbook (Addison Wesley, 2000), was published just as customer relationship management was getting white-hot. Companies were investing tens of millions buying CRM systems, redesigning customer-facing business processes, and training customer-facing staff members in cross-selling conversations.
After all the vendor hype, millions in investment, and inordinate executive mindshare, it turned out that CRM systems were generating data that was no more useful than it was before CRM. CRM had been a downright failure—industry analysts were throwing around the 80 percent figure—at these early-adopter companies, most of which had naively believed the vendors and taken a ready, shoot, aim! approach to CRM delivery.
The ongoing phenomenon of duplicate or incomplete customer records continued to be the culprit behind compliance fines, fraught financial reporting, eroding sales revenues, and embarrassing ...
