Making the Case for Customer Data Integration
Jill Dyché, Evan Levy · 2012
This chapter briefly discusses the business case for successful customer data integration (CDI), which requires a deliberate approach to explaining the problem, educating stakeholders, and laying out the financial costs and benefits. A critical aspect of customer identity management capabilities is maintaining the original value of the source data. CDI ensures that customers are identified correctly, that the data is matched and merged, and that different divisions can see the same customer in different but accurate ways. A business case can usually be made for CDI based on the maintenance cost savings alone. Programmers who have become experts in moving data around the company might perceive that a CDI hub could remove the need for extraction, transformation, and loading, ETL. As the CDI hub supports additional applications, each application's data-sharing and standardization requirements can help a company develop sanctioned standards for customer data.