What exactly is CDI anyway?
It's not a solution searching for a problem, but it is clearly a problem searching for a definition.
When talking about CDI the first step is agreement on terms, and one of the principal sources of confusion is the proliferation of three-letter acronyms (TLAs) in this area. There are few formal definitions, and even seasoned industry professionals use the terms to mean different things. As a result, we see a lot of comments like Manu Radhakumari's on his blog:
Let's see if we can provide a working definition or construct for CDI, then in subsequent posts we can compare CDI to each of the IT disciplines mentioned above.
CDI, Customer Data Integration, is defined by Gartner as:
CDI therefore can be thought of as a three part solution. First, data must be aggregated from the multiple source systems in which it currently resides. Second, the data must be quality assured. This includes matching, reconciliation, scrubbing (e.g. valid US mailing address, city and postal code matching, capitalization and punctuation), and data enhancement. Finally, this "reference source" customer record must be communicated to the systems that need to consume it, and a methodology for keeping the data in synch with the master must be incorporated. This differs primarily according to the ability of the target systems to consume data in real time versus batch processing mode, and the resulting accommodations that need to be made in the larger business processes which depend on the customer data int hose systems. Simple, eh? Aggregation, data quality, and distribution.
The goal of CDI as a technology discipline is equally straighforward, and corresponds to the three part CDI definition described above: to create, maintain and distribute the single, referential, master customer record.
With that definition in mind, we can begin to compare and contrast the different technologies represented in the alphabet soup roster above, to better understand how CDI fits within the overall enterprise architecture.
We'll provide separate entries comparing CDI to MDM, CRM, DW, EII, ETL and EAI for your perusal and comments.
When talking about CDI the first step is agreement on terms, and one of the principal sources of confusion is the proliferation of three-letter acronyms (TLAs) in this area. There are few formal definitions, and even seasoned industry professionals use the terms to mean different things. As a result, we see a lot of comments like Manu Radhakumari's on his blog:
"Customer data integration (CDI), solutions from newer vendors are confusing me. Both EII and CDI are based on real time pull based technology. I can see only a perspective difference between the two..."Manu is on the Liquid Data team at BEA. Similarly, BI Research founder and president Colin White's recent blog entry says:
"Enterprise data integration is a hot topic and covers a wide range of technologies including enterprise application integration (EAI), enterprise information integration (EII), and extract, transformation and load (ETL). Master Data Management (MDI) is also a data integration technology and should be added to list. Just to make life interesting, analyst organizations like Gartner are talking about Customer Data Integration (CDI), which to me is a subset of MDM. Sorting all this out and coming up with a data integration strategy is not easy."He's got that right! Even the definitions proferred by the analyst community are not all that helpful, as they tend to be very high-level and general. This is understandable, since if Gartner or Forrester is going to write a report on CDI, they don't want to draw the definitions so tightly that they can't talk about many of these closely related concepts. But it doesn't help us much in our search for clarity.
Let's see if we can provide a working definition or construct for CDI, then in subsequent posts we can compare CDI to each of the IT disciplines mentioned above.
CDI, Customer Data Integration, is defined by Gartner as:
"the combination of the technology, processes and services needed to create and maintain an accurate, timely and complete view of the customer across multiple channels, business lines and, enterprises, where there are multiple sources of customer data in multiple application systems and databases”.
CDI therefore can be thought of as a three part solution. First, data must be aggregated from the multiple source systems in which it currently resides. Second, the data must be quality assured. This includes matching, reconciliation, scrubbing (e.g. valid US mailing address, city and postal code matching, capitalization and punctuation), and data enhancement. Finally, this "reference source" customer record must be communicated to the systems that need to consume it, and a methodology for keeping the data in synch with the master must be incorporated. This differs primarily according to the ability of the target systems to consume data in real time versus batch processing mode, and the resulting accommodations that need to be made in the larger business processes which depend on the customer data int hose systems. Simple, eh? Aggregation, data quality, and distribution.
The goal of CDI as a technology discipline is equally straighforward, and corresponds to the three part CDI definition described above: to create, maintain and distribute the single, referential, master customer record.
With that definition in mind, we can begin to compare and contrast the different technologies represented in the alphabet soup roster above, to better understand how CDI fits within the overall enterprise architecture.
We'll provide separate entries comparing CDI to MDM, CRM, DW, EII, ETL and EAI for your perusal and comments.
2 Comments:
searchCRM.com offers another definition:
"Customer data integration (CDI) is the process of consolidating and managing customer information from all available sources, including contact details, customer valuation data, and information gathered through interactions such as direct marketing. Properly conducted, CDI ensures that all relevant departments in the company have constant access to the most current and complete view of customer information available. As such, CDI is an essential element of customer relationship management (CRM)."
The CDI Institute offers yet another defintion:
"The customer data integration (CDI) market is comprised of process and technology solutions for recognizing a customer at any touch-point — while aggregating accurate, up-to-date knowledge about that customer and delivering it in an actionable form ‘just in time’ to touch-points. "
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