Customer Master Ownership After Acquisition
Northline Retail acquired Vantage Markets eleven months ago. The combined company runs two CRM platforms: Northline's legacy system holds 780,000 customer records, Vantage's holds 640,000, and the integration team estimates 18% overlap. Consent flags are missing on 7% of records, and the two companies used different definitions of 'active customer.' Northline's data stewards report to the IT division; Vantage's stewards sit in regional business units. The CDO has 90 days before a unified billing platform goes live and must assign accountability for a single customer master. Escalations are already reaching the steering committee because neither stewardship group will accept ownership of the golden record, and the billing vendor requires one authoritative source. The CDO also faces a board mandate to cut duplicate marketing spend by 15% within two quarters.
1. Recommend a target ownership and stewardship model for the customer master. Justify your choice against the 90-day constraint and the two existing reporting lines.
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Recommendation: assign a single business data owner and separate stewardship from IT reporting. The 90-day deadline rules out a full operating-model redesign. Name the Chief Customer Officer as accountable data owner for the customer master, with a federated stewardship council of Northline and Vantage stewards. Move Northline stewards to a dotted line to the CDO for standards and quality, while leaving their day-to-day work in IT; Vantage stewards keep business-unit reporting but receive written stewardship responsibilities and decision rights.
Reasoning: IT-led stewardship tends to optimize system fields, not business definitions, and Vantage's business stewards are closer to consent and marketing use. A single owner resolves the 'neither group will accept ownership' escalation. The risk is that the owner lacks capacity; mitigate with a 90-day charter, a named deputy, and escalation to the CDO for cross-unit disputes. Do not create a co-ownership committee-shared accountability is the current failure mode.
2. The billing launch cannot wait for full deduplication. Describe the minimum governance decisions the CDO must secure before go-live and who must make them.
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Minimum decisions: (1) Golden record source-select Northline CRM as system of record for billing, with Vantage records mapped and merged by survivorship rules; (2) Survivorship rules-who wins on name, address, consent, and account status, approved by the data owner; (3) Consent remediation owner-business steward accountable for the 7% missing flags, with legal sign-off before billing; (4) Duplicate handling-accept 18% duplicates as a known issue post-launch only if billing uses a mastered ID, not raw CRM records; (5) Billing vendor mapping sign-off-data owner and vendor jointly accept field-level definitions.
Decision rights: CDO recommends the model; the Chief Customer Officer decides golden source and survivorship; legal decides consent risk tolerance; steering committee ratifies go-live with documented exceptions. The minimum is not full deduplication-it is a defensible authoritative source and a named owner for every open exception.
3. Propose two measures the CDO should report to the board to show stewardship is working, and explain why each is leading or lagging.
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Report two measures: percentage of billing-critical customer data elements with a named steward and an approved definition (leading) and duplicate rate in the mastered customer file (lagging). The leading measure predicts whether accountability is being installed before billing; the lagging measure shows whether marketing spend and billing accuracy improve. Add a third if allowed: consent completeness rate (leading/lagging hybrid) because it is a legal risk, not just quality. Avoid reporting only catalog logins or steward meeting attendance-those show activity, not outcomes. State baselines and targets: 100% of billing-critical elements assigned within 30 days, duplicate rate below 5% by quarter two. Assign each measure an owner and a review cadence at the steering committee.