CDI Station is intended to be an information source AND a discussion forum for issues related to Customer Data Integration. There are a few reasons for setting up this site:

There is a lot of confusion out there on the topic of CDI, including exactly what it is. Does it include customer analytics like profitability and product utilization? Where is the line between a customer data hub and a transaction hub? Which customer information belongs in the master? What's the difference between MDM, EII and CDI? Is Data Quality part of CDI, and how does it fit? What about privacy preferences? This confusion is an obstacle to getting CDI projects underway.

There is a lot of misinformation on CDI out there, mostly in the form of vendors bashing each other over perceived shortcomings. There is also stale and inaccurate information from analysts that no longer reflect the state of the art in vendors' CDI offerings. This creates the potential for mistakes.

There is very little specific, detailed or comprehensive information on CDI out there. There are plenty of articles that say "you need CDI to effectively cross-sell your customers", or "metadata is very important", but not much practical information. We'd like to help remedy that, and provide a vehicle for you to help your peers.

Finally, there is not much available in the way of hard metrics for estimating CDI implementation costs, measuring benefits to determine ROI, or estimating Total Cost of Ownership over longer periods of time. It is important for the industry to gather those statistics and foster discussion of hard costs savings (operational efficiencies from reduced data error rates), hard revenue improvements (more effective cross-selling and "next logical product" offerings, soft cost savings (improved customer loyalty and reduction in churn rates) and soft revenue improvements (high levels of customer satisfaction, greater share of wallet).

It's a modest little set of goals, but we have to start somewhere.