Customer Dimension and CRM related Analytics

Why is the customer dimension so important?

• A well-maintained, well-deployed conforming customer dimension is the cornerstone of sound customer centric analysis

What are special characteristics of the customer dimension?

• Customer dimension is extremely deep. It may have million rows.
• Customer dimension is extremely wide. It has hundreds of attributes.
• Customer dimension changes often. It is not really a slowly changing dimension. It is sometimes called as rapidly changing monster dimension.
• Keeping the historical images of the customer data is important.
• The data in the customer dimension come from multiple sources. Matching, de-dup, standardization among different sources is critical for successfully conforming the dimension.
• The customer dimension with data may be enriched from the external data.
• Customer data is the source for other dimensions – geography, industry, lines of business, etc.
• You have to comply with the privacy regulation.
• The data from external source may be only licensed for a period of time. The external data need to be associated with your own internal data for analysis for special purposes and the data need to be removed from your database.
• The customer dimension itself is actually a source of fact tables. For example, # of customer living in California with the breakdown by age groups.

Recent posts on my MDM blog

Good information comes from good data.  The quality of your data warehouse relies on a good master data management (MDM) solution.   Here are some of important concepts in any MDM application.  I explain more of them in my MDM blog – http://groups.google.com/group/MDM-us.

Survivorship – what is this?

Cross Referencing – why do we need it?

Microsoft acquires MDM vendor Stratature

Microsoft recently purchased a Master Data Management vendor Stratature. After I looked at their web site, I guess that Stratature’s offerings seems falling into the BI related MDM , like what Oracle – Hyperion’s product. Their webinar is co-presented with Joy Mundy from the Kimbal Group.

Stratature provides the “Dimension Manager” as the solution for Customer Data Integration. Based on the name of the product, we can also know their solution is BI centric.

Here are several requirements I guessed they tried to target:

Why is a single view of customers important?

I think that it is important to understand why a single view of customer important.  Understanding this provides you a good perspective on why you should implement a MDM, or a CDI, solution.

I believe that a data warehouse deployment will be much easier and simplier if we can assume a MDM is in place.  However it requires some design efforts to leverage MDM in data warehouse data model and ETL design.