Jeff Jonas: There Is No Such Thing As A Single Version of Truth
If you are not interested in a technical peculiarity that occurs in aggregated data sets, just ignore this post.
I am often asked what my thoughts are about selecting the single best attributes (e.g., best name and best address) when multiple attributes are known. I always respond with, "truth is in the eye of the beholder."
This came as a hard lesson. In the mid-1990's, I built a data warehouse that was being fed daily by over 4,000 disparate operational systems belonging to handful of widely recognized consumer brands. The goal was to better understand the customer by recognizing when the same person was transacting across different brands all held by the same holding company. The underlying motivation: the more fully the customer is understood the more you can sell to the customer.
There I sat with a number of marketing VP's, each representing their brand's interests. And while everyone worked for the same parent company, there was one question no one could agreed upon: When a consumer has transacted with all of the brands, each time using a slightly different name or new address, which name and address should be considered the enterprise-wide GOLD standard? As it turns out, there is no such thing as a single version of truth.
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