Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

CHANGE MANAGEMENT FOR CDI

Mark Twain once said, “I’m all for progress. It’s change I don’t like.”

It’s important to understand that CDI involves a continuous set of practices to refine and maintain the data. It also involves rigorous steps for changes that can occur at one of three different levels:

1. The application might need new data that’s not currently in the CDI hub. This usually occurs when a new business requirement is introduced.

2. The CDI hub might change the way it identifies a particular data element, forcing the client application to change.

3. The source system might change, leading to a change in incoming data.

Change management is a critical practice for CDI. Successful CDI projects incorporate the knowledge that systems and their data are constantly in flux; hence, plans to support these changes are critical. CDI development teams need to constantly communicate with source system data stewards to understand the changes that may be affecting the data in advance. The following list exemplifies the most common types of data changes:

• The source system might add new data fields.

• The source system may repurpose existing data fields.

• The source system application processing logic might change.

• There could be new transaction types.

Change management for CDI needs to be both reactive and proactive. The CDI development team members should ideally attend the source system team’s change control meetings to understand upcoming source system changes. (They ...