News

DataFlux offers best practices bundle for customer data

• By Stephen Swoyer
• March 1, 2006

DataFlux execs bill the company's first branded CDI deliverable as a software- and best practices-based bundle designed to help companies get their own CDI practices up and running. To that end, DataFlux CDI brings a quality-focused approach to the synchronization, consolidation and management of customer information. It's based on service-oriented underpinnings and plugs right into DataFlux' Data Quality Integration Platform.

Ron Agresta, solutions manager for DataFlux CDI, claims his company has a different take on CDI and its attendant problems. "A lot of people have viewed customer data integration as a plumbing problem, about how to get data from Point A to Point B, Point B being a master hub. We think a lot of attention needs to be focused on the stuff in the pipes, and a lot of work needs to be done to make the data as consistent and reliable as possible."

DataFlux CDI ships with pre-defined business rules for managing customer data, along with canned best practices and a tunable data model. Customers can tap DataFlux CDI to support data quality and matching, augment customer data, enforce "householding" practices, build cross references to source systems and persist data in a master customer file. Because it's based on the same service-oriented underpinnings as the rest of DataFlux' Data Quality Integration Platform, CDI can incorporate data from other service-enabled sources, too.

CDI can be deployed as a mostly canned solution, Agresta says, but customers can also customize it, if need be. "They can change the model if they need to, change the data quality rules, the identity management rules."

Nor must CDI be an all-encompassing practice, Agresta says. Companies can take baby steps. "We're not saying you'll want to store every little piece of a customer inside this master reference, but we are saying if someone wants to learn more about something, they can store some key attributes--name, address, that kind of thing--inside," he comments. "At the end of the day, you'll have a master repository that has the linkages and cross references to know where the other pieces are."