Integration Woes: Often one of the biggest challenges for an organisation can be getting a clean and consistent view of key information. Frequently information is held in a number of different systems and is passed around via point-to-point integration – each system talks to other systems via different tactical interfaces. It can be difficult to understand the flow of data and which system ‘owns’ each piece of information. What’s more it can be very difficult when you replace a system to identify exactly what other systems it communicates to – and any replacement system has to try and replicate these interfaces.

So What Is CDI?: CDI (or Customer Data Integration) is all about having a strategic integration plan. It’s all about putting processes, controls and automation in place to integrate data (not just customer data) from different systems.

All information is passed to a ‘hub’ via standard interfaces – and is subject to common business rules and data cleansing routines. The ‘hub’ creates ‘golden records’ for each piece of data – a clean and consistent version of the information. This also contains a reference to all of the systems that subscribe to this information, so that they can be notified using a common mechanism of any changes.

So How Does CRM Fit In?: At SAM7 we have used Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a CDI 'hub'. All 'golden records' are centrally stored in the CRM as entities – allowing your team to analyse, export and report on the information. CRM provides a straightforward framework for maintaining these entities and also provides sophisticated web services that can be used as common interfaces.