Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

CHAPTER 8

Making the Case for Customer Data Integration

What can’t your business do that it needs to do, and how can integrated customer data help? Understanding what’s missing in your company’s business and information technology (IT) capabilities is a great first step in pitching an initial customer data integration (CDI) project. However, as with most strategic IT endeavors, CDI requires a deliberate approach to explaining the problem, educating stakeholders, laying out the financial costs and benefits, and continuously communicating progress.

CDI’s promise lies in its ability to deliver integrated customer information operationally. Where customer relationship management (CRM), data warehouses, custom applications, and even emerging technologies like enterprise information integration (EII) can provide a window into customer information, they usually rely on an incomplete view of the customer. CDI provides customer information as of right now. It serves a class of business problems in need of immediate, current, accurate, and complete customer data.

Justifying CDI can challenge even the most hardened manager, and will probably have as much to do with your organization’s political environment as it will with formal business case development. This chapter provides some practical advice on how to make the CDI pitch and how to deflect the inevitable arguments from those in your organization that have a firm stake in the status quo.