Identity Fragmentation

Common indicators include…

• Staff remember which IDs refer to the same request
• Spreadsheets reconcile system identifiers
• Reports disagree about the number of active items
• An agent finds several apparent versions of one object

Why it may happen

Each system creates an identity suitable for its own task. The organisation has not made the relationships between those identities explicit, so people maintain the crosswalk in memory.

What it can cost

Updates may attach to the wrong object, records may be counted twice and matching can become an ongoing manual task. Automation makes unreliable identity resolution more consequential, not less.

Questions worth asking

• Which real-world thing does each record represent?
• Are these identifiers aliases, stages or genuinely different objects?
• What evidence proves that two records refer to the same object?

Possible interventions

• Define the business object and its lifecycle.
• Create a governed mapping between local IDs and a canonical identifier.
• Validate merges, splits and exceptions rather than matching on name alone.