The sum of procedures, automation, and skills that are required to standardize and integrate customer data that originates from different sources. CDI attempts to address the situation when two or more sources that contain records referring to an overlapping set of real-world customers lack unique identifiers that show the correspondences between the records in the multiple sources. Furthermore, the records representing the same entity might have differing information. For example, one record might have the address that misspelled, another record might be missing some fields, and so on.