Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

STURM UND DRANGOF DATA OWNERSHIP

It’s the single most prevalent question we hear from our clients, prospects, and conference audiences: “Who in the company should own the data?” Moreover, when we ask people about who owns the data in their companies, the answers are tentative, as if the respondent had never considered the question. However, the lack of a clear, concise answer to the question of corporate data ownership has daily consequences. Consider these three scenarios:

1. The marketing organization at an automobile company won’t share its data. With anyone. Ever. The data mart contains important strategic information like the customer segments who responded most frequently to high-profile campaigns and what the return on marketing costs were. The product design organization would like to see the data as they target certain demographics for new model features. But marketing won’t budge.

2. An international bank we work with recently assembled a compliance SWAT team to examine the various operational systems that could provide loan data for support of Basel II. (Basel II regulation dictates that financial services companies must understand and communicate their corporate exposure when they make loans to certain parties.) The company’s loan origination was homegrown and had been in place for almost 20 years. It contained proprietary codes without supplementary definitions, requiring a team of highly specialized programmers to routinely maintain it. Unfortunately, this group ...