Three divisions, one customer. New-business sales carries him as an opportunity, base management as a contract account, service as a ticket history. Three data sets, three definitions, three truths.
Such projects almost always start with an officially good mood. Everyone wants “the one customer view”. Then months go into negotiating interfaces, field mappings and identity matching, and progress is remarkably sluggish. The reason rarely lies in the technology: the merged view would expose that the three truths contradict each other. Whose revenue figure counts? Whose customer status? Whose segmentation? That is exactly why, deep down, nobody wants the single customer view. They just don’t want to be the one to say it.
I therefore consider the 360-degree view a power project disguised as a data project. A shared customer view forces departments to share data that used to give them control. And nobody gives up control voluntarily - least of all for an integration project.
The mechanics behind it are almost always the same: the KPIs diverge, so the data diverges. If sales is measured on new contracts and service on case-closure times, both maintain the same customer data with different interests. One sees an opportunity, the other a closed case. No integration layer in the world evens that out. The data is not inconsistent because the systems are bad. It is inconsistent because the incentives are.
What it takes instead is uncomfortable but brief: an authority above the departments with an interest in the whole customer and the mandate to enforce binding definitions. Without that mandate, every 360-degree view remains a collection of partial truths that sit side by side without fitting together. With it, the integration afterwards becomes craftsmanship. Laborious, yes. But solvable.
So before you commission the next integration project, settle three things that appear in no requirements document:
- Which department would have to give up control for a shared customer view to exist?
- What does it get in return?
- Who has the authority to enforce the binding definition of “customer” when two divisions contradict each other?
Whoever has answered these questions has the hard part behind them.