The pattern is familiar. Sales operations reports one attainment figure, the brand team reports another, the field reports a third, and a new dashboard gets commissioned to reconcile them.
Underneath, the same prescriber exists three times across CRM, claims and the pharmacy feed, affiliated to two accounts and one practice that dissolved last year. Each system made a reasonable call about which record is real. None of them logged the decision, so all three reports are internally consistent and mutually incompatible.
How one unresolved record travels
The customer lands in the wrong territory, so the coverage plan starts out slightly wrong.
The coverage plan feeds attainment, the incentive follows, and an appeal gets raised.
Attainment enters the response model as a control, so the marketing read inherits it.
By the time anyone traces it back, three teams have stopped treating one source as authoritative.
A governed data layer is less a platform decision than an agreement about whose number stands when two teams differ.
- Resolve identity first — customer, account, affiliation, and the journey where consent permits.
- Give every definition a named owner, so a change is a decision rather than a discovery.
- Publish the match rate beside the performance figure, so confidence travels with the number.
- Re-run resolution on a schedule; a spine built once loses meaningful accuracy inside two quarters.