Case 01 — Post-Merger Customer 360 & Enterprise Reporting
Situation
A company acquires a regional competitor and wants a usable Customer 360 plus consolidated executive reporting within six months.
The combined environment contains:
- five customer systems with different Customer IDs;
- duplicate people and organizations across sources;
- some source systems treating an organization and its contacts as one record while others separate them;
- three country-code schemes (US, USA, 840) and two customer-status code sets;
- conflicting Customer names, addresses and contact information;
- no agreed enterprise Customer definition;
- unclear source authority for several attributes;
- no consistent lineage from sources into the executive warehouse;
- a warehouse team proposing to concatenate all source tables and choose “the most complete row” as the golden record;
- business units insisting their local Customer values remain authoritative;
- privacy obligations that differ by jurisdiction.
Executives ask for “one clean customer table” and want the warehouse team to start merging immediately.
Your task
Use the ten-layer case-study worksheet.
Your response must explicitly distinguish: - Governance decision vs Data Management implementation; - Reference Data vs Master Data; - Data Architecture vs detailed Data Modeling; - profiling / Data Quality assessment vs entity resolution; - mapping/transformation vs source remediation; - master identity vs a conformed analytical Customer dimension; - internal confidentiality/access design vs jurisdictional regulatory obligations.
Minimum retrieval requirements
Without opening the solution, state: 1. why country-code translation and duplicate-Customer resolution are different problems; 2. where a Global ID/X-Ref belongs in the solution; 3. why “most complete row wins” is not a sufficient survivorship rule; 4. why the warehouse should not become the de facto authority before source/governance decisions are made; 5. what must be preserved so a bad merge can be audited/reversed; 6. what would make the analytical Customer dimension conformed rather than merely shared.