Blog: Jill Dyche

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CDI in Silicon Valley (and Dallas, and New York)

Jill does Dallas! (And San Jose, and New York.) Consider attending one of the live CDI Executive Summits offered by BI Network and sponsored by DataFlux.

I’ve been writing and webbing about CDI for a number of months now. This week I gave one of my first in-depth seminars to a cross section of Bay Area professionals interested in reconciling CDI with the rest of their data enabling technologies.

The seminar—part of a three-city tour organized by the BI Network and sponsored by DataFlux—kicked off at San Jose’s Museum of Technology. DataFlux CEO Tony Fisher opened the session, doing his usual comprehensive job of covering the business drivers of integrated data. Tony described CDI as transcending the “single view of the customer” claim that it rightly owns. He offered a maturity model for Master Data Management and described each phase in the MDM capability continuum. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this guy runs a company AND he can talk about master data hubs.

Speaking of smart executives, Peter Harvey, founder and CEO of Intellidyn (www.intellidyn.com), presented a fact-filled case study describing how Intellidyn’s data reconciliation capabilities—fueled by the DataFlux matching engine—help the marketing services company deliver superior consumer data to its business customers. Intellidyn has become one of the few best practice companies in a space that is still so nascent that the early adopters are still adopting! No surprise that Inc. magazine named the company one of America’s fastest growing privately-held companies.

My talk was about why CDI has staying power. I like it when workshop attendees take notes—and the ink was flowing—but I like it even better when they ask questions. I’d anticipated inquiries about architecture and data models. To my surprise, nobody claimed, “We can do all that with our data warehouse!” I was beginning to think there wasn’t as much missionary work to do as I’d thought.

But then the questions began in earnest. Someone wanted to know how to leverage CDI to position more formal data management roles. Someone else asked for ways to position CDI to management as an analytics enabler. A group of people took me aside at the break and asked if CDI could help them redeploy their ETL programmers. And there were scads of questions about data governance.

Don’t worry—my final slide referred everyone to this blog, where there are as many answers as there are questions. If you happen to be in Dallas or New York, come and see us! Here are the coordinates: www.b-eye-network.com/dataflux/.

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