CDI - is it just another TLA (three letter acronym)?

I sometimes wonder if there’s substance behind the new catchphrases that the IT industry loves to throw about.  Take CDI, or Customer Data Integration, for example; is this some new, bright, shiny technology?  Or is it the cynical re-branding of something we already thought we had?

There is considerable confusion between CDI and that much-loved TLA (Three Letter Acronym) CRM – Customer Relationship Management.  CDI promises a single, 360 degree view of the customer; didn’t CRM promise the same thing?  I don’t blame anyone for being confused as, at it’s inception, I can remember myself thinking of CRM as an approach rather than a piece of technology and the single view of the customer was at the heart of it.  The truth is that, whilst CRM may have postulated the vision of a single customer view, the CRM vendors failed absolutely to deliver it.

That’s because CRM vendors focussed on the customer contact end of things; producing call-centre and sales-force automation technology, but did nothing to address the management of all the data that they collected.  Sure, the data model at the heart of any of these systems may support a single customer view, but without the processes to manage the quality of the data and identify and prevent duplicate customers from being created.

Furthermore, the processes that have been built around many of these systems have often encouraged the creation of dirty data rather than prevented it.  The most common name in one of my client’s CRM database was . .. (that’s a forename of “dot” and a surname of “dot dot”).  No, they had not started working in Morse Code, they had just paid the price for measuring the performance of their customer contact centre purely on call volumes, rather than the quality of service.

So what is Customer Data Integration and why is it different.  Firstly, let me say what it isn’t – it isn’t a piece of technology, the silver-bullet to solve all of your customer data challenges.  CDI should be a business objective – the management and coordination of all the information that a company holds on its customers.  For some, this may mean pulling all of their data into a single database and managing it there; but they will be the rare exceptions.

The reality is that most organisations will continue to live with multiple systems, including CRM, but will seek to create and manage the single view across all of them.  This presents them with two clear options: one where the data is federated and the single view created on the fly; and the other (I suspect more popular) option of creating a centralised “hub” that holds the master customer data with “spokes” that connects it to each of the other systems and synchronises data across them.

Critical to any of these approaches is the management of the quality of the data.  You can spend a fortune on a new car, but it won’t get you very far if you fill it with sludgy fuel and run it without a fuel filter.  In business, the challenge of dirty data must be tackled throughout the enterprise.

So is CDI something new?  Well I’m afraid, in true “there’s nothing new under the sun” style, the answer is no (I delivered my first CDI solution more than a decade ago, although the term was not widely in use then).  My hope is that the technology vendors supports the business community in achieving CDI as an objective, rather than uses it as just another way to sell CRM.

Comments

[Morgan Goeller]

Steve,

Great points about CDI. Just added you to the blogroll.

One of the central failings of a lot of these types of initiatives is that they assume that there is one definition of a "customer" within an organization. Usually even the basic concepts (customers, units, sales, etc.) mean different things to different people, even under the same umbrella.

I think it is fair to say that even the ost basic data definitions are more complex than business users realize and far more difficult to deal with than software hawkers would care to admit. Of course, they are usually less complex than Consultants who are paid by the hour would like you to believe ....