The Stack That Nobody Owns
Meridian Health Tech is a 250-person company with a CRM, a marketing automation platform, a CPQ tool, a support desk, a billing system, and a data warehouse. Four teams maintain four different lead-source taxonomies. Contact duplicates run at 11%, nightly syncs fail two to three times per week, and attribution reports disagree by up to 30% depending on the dashboard. Sales blames marketing for bad routing; marketing blames CRM hygiene; finance does not trust pipeline reporting. No single person owns integrations. IT owns the tools but not the business rules; RevOps owns reporting but not system administration. The company is about to buy a customer data platform to fix the problem. The CFO has asked for a systems assessment before any new spend is approved. You have four weeks and one business systems analyst.
1. What is your first move, and what would you put in a one-page systems assessment for the CFO? Be specific about source-of-truth decisions.
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The first move is not a CDP purchase; it is a source-of-truth decision. Convene a one-hour workshop with marketing, sales, finance, support, and IT to assign ownership for five domains: account, contact, lead, opportunity, and customer. For each, name the system of record, the system of entry, and the systems of reference. Example: CRM is system of record for account and opportunity; marketing automation is system of entry for leads but not the source of truth for contact email; billing is system of record for customer contract status. Put this on one page with a RACI.
For the CFO assessment, include the current integration map, duplicate rate by object, a 30-day sync failure log, the top three business decisions that are wrong because of data, and the cost and risk of the proposed CDP. Show that 30% attribution disagreement is likely a taxonomy and identity problem, not a missing tool. Recommend a 90-day cleanup and governance sprint before any new platform spend. The CDP may be justified later, but only after business rules and ownership are clear.
2. How would you diagnose the sync failures and duplicate records without boiling the ocean? What order would you fix them in?
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Do not boil the ocean. Start with the highest-cost object: contacts and accounts. Pull a sample of 500 duplicate pairs and classify causes: same person different email, company name variations, domain aliases, and incomplete imports. Fix matching rules and normalization first, then run a controlled merge with a backup.
For sync failures, review the error log for two weeks and group by cause: authentication, field mapping, rate limits, required-field violations, and conflicting updates. Fix the top two causes, add retry and alerting, and publish a daily sync health check. Order of work: stop new duplicates at the point of entry with validation and dedupe rules; fix the most business-critical integration, likely CRM-to-marketing automation for lead routing; clean historical duplicates in batches by segment; reconcile attribution taxonomies. Do not start with the data warehouse; it will amplify bad data. Assign a single integration owner in RevOps with IT as platform support. Track duplicate rate, sync success rate, and attribution variance weekly.
3. How would you establish ongoing ownership and change control between IT, RevOps, marketing, and finance?
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Create a lightweight data governance council that meets biweekly: RevOps chair, IT platform lead, marketing ops, sales ops, and finance. It owns the system-of-record map, change control, and prioritization. Any new field, integration, or taxonomy change requires a one-page request with business case, affected systems, and rollback plan. IT owns infrastructure, security, and vendor management. RevOps owns business rules, data definitions, and reporting. Marketing and finance own their domain definitions but must use the shared taxonomy.
Publish a data dictionary with 20 core fields, not 200. Establish a change calendar and a freeze window around quarter end. For ownership conflicts, escalate to the CRO and CFO jointly. Measure governance by number of unplanned changes, sync uptime, duplicate rate, and time to resolve data incidents. The goal is not a committee; it is faster, safer decisions. Review the RACI quarterly and retire it if it becomes a bottleneck.