Jill, glad to see you on SearchDataManagement.com in near real-time. Here's a question for you: how did Customer Data Integration (CDI) technologies come about? What was the inception of CDI and why couldn't other technologies handle the problem?
QUESTION POSED ON: 27 AUG 2006
QUESTION ANSWERED BY: Jill Dyche
CDI came about because -- even with Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies, and all the various and sundry tools available to move data between applications -- there was no good solution to move good, clean, reconciled data between applications. Before CDI, this had to be done with custom coding.
Make no mistake -- EAI is still a really important solution for moving messages between operational applications. Those applications still need to be able to integrate data. If a customer calls into a call center and provides a different telephone number than what's on record, the EAI system can't figure that out. It doesn't determine who the customer is based on her phone number -- that's the job of the CDI hub.
Some of the CDI vendors also evolved from solving specialized problems that were really difficult. For example, operationalizing customer identification -- whether the customer is at a kiosk, a web storefront, on the phone, or crossing a border -- is a big, hairy, audacious and processing-intensive problem, and there are CDI vendors out there whose tools can make a huge difference in customer recognition.
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