Integration and the Customer Data Hub (page 1 of 2)

This is because most companies have a decentralised organisational structure in which each department has created its own system for handling customer information.

This information is not - and often simply cannot be - shared across the company, so it is referred to as the "silo" approach. In addition, each department may cleanse and standardise the data at each source separately, resulting in inconsistent and redundant processes along with significant additional costs.

The result is that senior executives are often making critical business decisions on intuition or old data rather than on credible information. There is enormous interest in the business community of integrating computerised data to deliver a "single source of truth" to top management.

Oracle, the leading enterprise software company, has developed its own solution, which it calls the Oracle Customer Data Hub. This is an innovation in software "architecture" that allows all legacy system and third-party information to be collected centrally in an online repository, to present one customer view across the entire enterprise.

The beauty of the hub environment is that the single source of truth can be achieved without disrupting existing business processes or requiring costly information technology (IT) reinvestments. Furthermore, all data quality and data maintenance services can be centrally maintained and managed, with the clean and standardised data flowing throughout the organisation and available to all users across all departments.

The conceptual breakthrough in the Customer Data Hub comes in understanding that certain data entities are shared resources across an organisation. Instead of each department maintaining its own version of a customer record separately, all shared attributes describing the customer record are merged into a single master file.

This approach allows for all relevant business transactions, activities and interactions to have visibility without the requirement of costly movement of transactional data. The data entities are the cross-reference keys that allow organisations to obtain a single source of truth without having to disrupt the transactional systems that are running the business.

"The Customer Data Hub is an operational system working in real time," explains Anthony Peake, Senior Director, Marketing, at Oracle EMEA. "As data enters the hub, the system automatically begins to verify, cleanse, de-duplicate, and merge the information - and then synchronise all systems. As a result, all corporate users - regardless of their role or location - use the same accurate, continually updated information."

As an analogy, think of the public water system. The water is centrally collected, purified and tested, then distributed from the pumping station to all connected users.

This is infinitely more logical than circulating untreated water and expecting each user to install a complete water filtration and testing system. With the hub as the data clearing house, all source systems use the same standardised processes and "clean" source of information.

Visitors to the United States may be familiar with the International House of Pancakes (IHOP) restaurant chain, which is an American institution. IHOP perfectly illustrates the financial potential of the Customer Data Hub model.

IHOP's corporate headquarters realized that the organization lacked a view into its franchised restaurants and wanted better visibility into the day-to-day operations of each of its locations.

Each franchise maintained its own data - legal, finance, operations, marketing, personnel - and had its own resources devoted to managing that data.