The Business Intelligence Blog

An excellent case study by Andres Perez, on how a company tried to deploy a single integrated customer database and practical challenges that they faced from financial to ROI questions. A must read.

The demand for integrated information has created a vendor response that has spawned a market for what many call customer data integration (CDI) or master data management (MDM). These approaches are characterized in many ways; however, they are typically presented as a “federation” or “consolidation” of disparate databases and applications to present an “integrated” or “unified” view of the customer, product, supplier, etc. The vendors offering customer relationship management (CRM) tools, CDI or MDM capabilities usually focus on facilitating and accelerating data movement from one or more databases or files to another using extract, transform and load (ETL), messaging (message queues), and other capabilities. How are these “solutions” meeting the customers’ expectations? In a previous article, I mentioned that data movement increases costs (adds more complexity to the information management environment), information float or delays (whether batch or messaging), reduces semantic value (much semantic value is casted in the context of the existing applications), and significantly increases the opportunity for introducing information defects. Customers are realizing that these “solutions” are more focused on attacking the symptoms (e.g., moving data around faster) instead of attacking the root cause (e.g., keeping the information integrated in one place in the first place).