Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

MANAGER DO’S AND DON’TS

Here are some final tips for managers who might be embarking on CDI and need to get their arms around data quality issues in advance:

• Do be willing to see requirements through the eyes of applications owners. CDI data is less about how people use the data than it is how systems use it. Ensuring that your CDI developers understand how applications use the data is an important step toward ensuring that CDI data is correctly provisioned.

• Don’t get sucked into invention mode. Yes, your team is smarter than everyone else. And no, the users don’t really care how the data is cleansed. You can build your own CDI solution from scratch. However, if you’re finding that a key business system needs new data and you can’t cleanse the data for a week and a half, maybe a vendor tool could speed up the process. If something breaks, is it easy to fix? If something changes, does someone have to write code? Are the people who know the homegrown tool consistently available? Consider costs of building and maintaining a homegrown CDI solution.

• Do talk to vendors to understand the functions and features available in “off-the-shelf” tools before committing to an internal development activity. This could save a lot of time and effort, and moreover prevents the trial and error that new development paradigms like CDI can introduce. For data quality, this can also help you understand common methods and practices used by companies with comparable business objectives.

• Don’t ...