Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

DATA INTEGRATION THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY

Accountability for providing integrated data to an application has traditionally been left to the individual application developer. Developers were forced to create custom code to retrieve the necessary data from each source system and then develop the logic to merge the data before it was available to the application. This required the developer to build an interface for retrieving data from each source system.

In the example in Exhibit 7.1, the customer support system is retrieving data from four other systems (service, billing, sales order, and loyalty). Supporting data integration across these systems required the developer to understand the data and code interfaces between the customer support system and the other four systems.

EXHIBIT 7.1 Retrieving Data from Four Systems

The problem arises that if other applications require customer data from these four systems, they too need interfaces. Because of the potential number of interface combinations, more developers will be necessary to maintain the interfaces than were required to build the original applications. As Exhibit 7.2 shows, this can become unwieldy.

In this so-called point-to-point environment, the developers need to build and maintain twelve separate interfaces to support moving data from four source systems to three different client applications. Moreover, as the source ...