CDI (Customer Data Integration)

CDI is the use of technology and business processes to build a 360 degree view of the customer.  CDI is sometimes considered to be a subset of or related to Master Data Management (MDM). 

From a technical perspective, CDI involves a number of typical data warehouse activities, such as extract, transform, and load (ETL), data cleansing, and meta data management, among others.  These approaches have been discussed in great detail by numerous sources, so I won’t elaborate here.  The one key aspect of the technical approach that is critical to the solution: In-house or outsource?  You need to decide whether to develop this solution in-house with either custom code or one of the numerous products marketed under the CDI banner, or to outsource the CDI effort.  The pros and cons of each are outside the scope of this posting, but it’s safe to say this is critical decision points for the project, as it impacts all down stream decisions.

The major difference as I see it is in the business approach.  The typical data warehouse initiative may be very broad in nature (enterprise focus), or it may be targeted for a particular business unit and/or functional group (e.g., marketing).  The CDI initiative is all about integrating and eliminating duplicate customer data, to provide a clean, consistent view of the relationship the company has with each of their customers.  This picture shows the core data associated with a 360 degree customer view:

• Unique identifiers such as customer id and SSN
• Transaction data such as orders and payments
• Account structure including parent child relationships
• All Interactions between the company and the customer, including e-mail, phone calls, and snail mail

• Marketing Attribution elements that allow the customer to be tied to specific marketing campaigns

The key issue in a CDI initiative will revolve around the proper definition of a “customer”, and the resulting effort to build a business model of the customer that accurately reflects the views of all business constituents.  Until this issue has been resolved, the technical implementation should not begin.

Please download my white paper 360 Degree Customer View for a more detailed discussion on this topic.

Reference Links:

-        Wikipedia Entry

-        DMReview Article

-        Gartner CDI Magic Quadrant

-        CDI Station