I just completed a data consolidation engagement with one of my clients. This engagement was focusing on customer data like Accounts, Activity, History..etc from diverse set of customer source systems. In the process as we went live successfully with this client there are a few things that we did differently and that really made difference to the client. The uniqueness about this engagement is that I am able to quickly engage the end users and reduce the time of participation from business domain experts on this exercise so that they can better focus on their high priority tasks.
A typical consolidation approach would be primarily to focus on the systems in the current scope and start extracting the data using ETL tools. Data thus extracted will be cleansed, standardized and then integrated ( to avoid redundancy) before flushing the content into target system. Many times this approach results in lot of iterations between staging and source systems. Each iteration would take considerable amount of time from the involved parties to address various issues (ex: which record has to take precedence, what should be the standard format in the consolidated world, which fields takes precedence..etc) Meanwhile end user has to wait his fingers crossed to see any outcome of this effort.
Contrary to this approach, Standardizing and cleansing the data locally with the help of domain experts helped for early adoption and less number of iterations. A decently cleansed and standardized local data will farewell as the data starts going through alignment with the rest of the data in the enterprise. Standardized data "need not be" in the final standard format as consolidated data would have. For example Lease Type attribute could have a value of "Annual" , "Monthly" ..etc with in your local system. While on the consolidated system it could be a code.(1, 2, etc). The key here "Standard to Standard translation is much efficient and less time consuming". This means iterations are happening internally before going to the final integration process ultimately leading to early participation from the end user.
This approach seems to be lean and strategic, enables early involvement of the end users thus leading to a satisfied client. Standardizing locally doesn't mean to revamp the existing apps and redesign the information content. Standardize the data to the extent permissible however possible in source system directly or in the extracts of the source systems before merging / integrating with staging data with the other similar systems.
