Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

CHAPTER 3

Challenges of Data Integration

Data is keeping executives awake at night. In fact, almost everyone in your organization has, at some point, wondered what information they were missing, what knowledge was being lost, and how the bottom line might be impacted. With their burgeoning focus on customers, companies need information more than ever. But with newfound customer-focused programs driving the need for integrated information, we’re all confronting the challenges of defining, locating, gathering, reconciling, deploying, and maintaining customer data. A company burdened by data silos has unwittingly established built-in barriers between its business units, discouraged its knowledge workers from fact-based decision making, and put itself at a competitive disadvantage.

Once executives had declared their customer-focused strategies and formulated the requisite visions, they had to acknowledge what they didn’t know. They didn’t know the scope of the data integration effort necessary to deliver key strategies. They didn’t know what data was available, and what was missing. They didn’t know the steps to provide meaningful information to an increasingly diverse business audience clamoring for it. These problems are turning out to be universal, irrespective of geography, industry, size, or growth rate. This chapter discusses the difficult data ordeals that many companies are still wrestling with, and others are in the process of conquering.