CRM professionals constantly tell me that poor customer data integration and management is one of the biggest barriers to getting value from their CRM initiatives. In a recent Forrester survey of over 1,000 North American and European decision-makers, 44% said that data management was a “critical” or “important” priority for 2008. A constant diet of poor quality data is a sure way starve your CRM applications and dim your customer intelligence.
 
In recent research note, my colleague at Forrester, Ray Wang, points out the right approach to customer data management is elusive. Over the past two decades, CRM professionals have explored a variety of approaches to managing customer master data across the enterprise.
 
Initial efforts focused on the development of data warehouses that would deliver "real-time" access to customer data. However, data warehouses failed on the "real-time" access, and end users compensated by deploying myriad purpose-built data marts.
 
Read the entire CustomerThink article.