Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

MANAGER DO’S AND DON’TS

Before you embark on project planning for CDI or begin talking to vendors about their CDI solutions, consider these do’s and don’ts:

• Do identify a single candidate application. This approach enforces scope of effort and renders requirements more straightforward, since the necessary functionality is already well understood. Take a look at your company’s IT development pipeline for the next 6 to 12 months. Perhaps there’s an opportunity to use the CDI hub as the de-facto customer data source for an upcoming application. By choosing an application that’s been scheduled for development, CDI functions can be “baked in” to the necessary data provisioning. If no new applications look like good candidates, choose an existing application that’s having trouble getting or providing integrated customer data. By identifying a single application for CDI to support, you’re delimiting requirements and avoiding scope creep.

• Don’t take on a business-critical system. Enabling a call center system to hit the CDI hub on the first try might risk existing customer relationships. We recently recommended that one client begin its CDI prototype by providing integrated customer data to a monthly revenue report that relied on specialized extracts from the operational order system. By getting the data from the CDI hub instead, the company could eliminate the custom extract programs that required support and ongoing maintenance. This also mitigated the risk involved, since if ...