Starting with last week’s challenge:

Suppose you have a company that does almost all of its business in its home country, and you are about to close on a deal with another company that has a customer base extends beyond your own borders. What kind of considerations should you keep in mind?

We’ll make this easy and assume the customer data and applications are located in the same country.

I’m going to touch on two different fascets:

  • The data access and ownership
  • The data itself (purely integration related)

Depending on which hat you’re wearing one of them will scare you a lot more than the other.

Data governance is a real thing and more than likely something the lawyers are keeping an eye on (along with any data privacy officer/CISO role). The big item over the last couple of years was the GDPR due to the EU customer base, but there is also the “right to be forgotten” laws as well as other jurisdictions outside the EU. Additionally, the EU also has strict data ownership laws and luckily we won’t need to worry about it for this exercise.

However, it still doesn’t stop HIPPA or FedRAMP style rules from kicking in, not to menion anything from the SEC.

Then there is the fun part of the technical integration. For that, I love coming back to my address book analogy. Maybe because I’ve been personally burned by it in my dev days just trying to sync my contacts. Possibly I’ve had a client that tracked phone numbers by keeping the US area code separate from the rest of the phone number. And don’t get me started trying to use one event ticket app where the mobile version would support an international phone number, but there was no way to link it to their website that expected a Japanese local number.

So those are the challenges, and I threw a few different things at you:

  • Data synchronization wheter built-in or custom made
  • Data compatability between third-party vendors
  • Comparable mappings between the two data
  • Compatible data formats (English to Chinese to Cyrillic let alone date/time formats)

Just because they support it doesn’t mean we should.

cab