Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

INTEGRATING MULTIPLE SYSTEMS WITH THE CDI HUB

Exhibit 7.2 illustrated seven systems interfacing to the CDI hub: the service system, the billing system, the sales order system, the loyalty system, the campaign management system, the customer support system, and the sales force automation system. In Exhibit 7.8, we’ve identified the two client applications, customer support and SFA, that use the CDI hub to retrieve customer details. And there are three source systems, service, billing, and sales order, that will provide customer data to the CDI hub. (For the moment we’ve left out two of the systems mentioned earlier, loyalty and campaign management, but we’ll cover them shortly.)

As you can see in Exhibit 7.8, the CDI hub has been configured to work with each of the individual systems.

The characteristics of each source system are known only to the CDI hub; the source system interface function is specifically configured to the source system. If the source system is a relational database, the source system interface will understand the SQL characteristics and customer data elements required by the hub. If the source system is a packaged ERP application, the source system interface understands the programming interface (e.g., API, Web services, objects, etc.) in order to request and retrieve data from the packaged ERP environment.

Each client application interfaces to the CDI hub in much the same manner. The client interface will support interacting with the client application ...