Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

MANAGER DO’S AND DON’TS

Making CDI work involves a diverse set of technologies, standards, policies, and skills. As you embark on retrofitting new CDI capabilities into your existing IT infrastructure, here are some tips to keep in mind:

• Do establish your development goals before you engage vendors. Are you looking to reduce coding complexity for programmers? Do you want to centralize customer identification and management? Do you need to raise performance to online transaction processing-class speeds? Understanding your functional requirements, as we discussed in Chapter 5 as well as the architectural functions discussed in this chapter will take you and your team a long way toward having informed vendor conversations.

• Don’t position the CDI hub as a replacement for a data warehouse or data mart. It’s not about customer data reporting; it’s about providing reconciled and authoritative customer data to other systems. While the CDI hub can offload customer data integration from a data warehouse or mart, it’s not intended to replace the query and reporting functionality inherent in data warehouse and business intelligence environments.

• Do focus on leveraging the existing IT infrastructure to support CDI. If you’ve already invested in EAI or extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) technology, review where you can leverage your team’s current experience and existing technologies to simplify CDI implementation.

• Don’t assume that CDI will release the development organization ...