I know that many companies have already identified the need to unify (centralize) people's data, whether customers, suppliers, business partners, employees, etc., so that they can be consumed by their corporate solutions. Question: What was the strategy used by your company?

The first thing that you must do is decide on the Data Model that fits your business, meets the business objectives and is appropriate to the size of data that we’re talking about.  What you want is a single source of the truth, or ‘gold dataset’ to use.

Once that is done, pick an Integration Layer, that’ll enable you to consolidate and ratify data from the systems that you have, which will feed the database.

We have multiple systems that all feed a Datamart, which is then used as the single source.

It isn’t easy, nor is it cheap, and takes time and planning to get it right.

hello we actually did not centralise the business apps, but rather the data itself essentially for harmonisation & reporting purposes. We still select fit-for-purpose business apps rather than platforms or all-in-one apps. BR,
Juliette