Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

COMING FULL CIRCLE: DATA MANAGEMENT AND CDI

Why have we spent an entire chapter on formalizing data governance and data management? Because these topics are routinely ignored in the rush to deliver CDI functionality. The risk is throwaway code, a canceled project, or the validation of organizational cowboys who are doing their own thing with data, thus perpetuating the isolation and underfunding of a critical corporate asset.

The details of data conversion, data cleansing, data standardization, and data storage are all too often one-off tasks that are done over and over again, exacerbating already dire problems of inconsistent data. If a customer data hub contains invalid or bad data, it may end up propagating that data to other enterprise systems. Regardless of whether the team is taking a top-down or a bottom-up development approach as defined in Chapter 5, the CDI team should be prepared to function within a larger MDM framework that includes both formalized job roles and data policies. This means that the CDI development team must collaborate with staff that has data governance and MDM responsibilities in order to:

• Profile the data as it comes onto the hub. (In the case of a persistent hub, the data should be profiled before it’s acquired by the hub.)

• Work with the source data stewards on change management, and ensure that source system data stewards haven’t changed or repurposed data elements.

• Understand the changes in the business. For instance, sales district assignments ...