e-Government and Green Hat

e-Government Solutions - Customer Data Integration (CDI)

What is Customer Data Integration?

"Customer data integration (CDI) is the combination of the technology, processes and services needed to create and maintain an accurate, timely and complete view of the customer across multiple channels, business lines and, enterprises, where there are multiple sources of customer data in multiple application systems and databases."
- Gartner

The ultimate goal and purpose of CDI is to deliver a "single view of the customer". Needless to say, this is not an easy task considering most local authorities have multiple information touch-points or "access channels" including the Internet, "contact" or "call" centres, e-mail and mobile technology. This makes the unified view of information a near impossibility.

Recently, companies have turned to three common technologies to create solutions for customer data integration. These technologies include:

Extract-Transform-Load (ETL),
Enterprise Information Integration (EII)

Data query and aggregation tools

Data Quality (DQ) tools.

However, on their own the above technologies are insufficient. Green Hat firmly believes that a reliable Customer Data Integration (CDI) platform can only be delivered through the use of traditional EAI techniques and SOA concepts.

Why is CDI Important?

According to Gartner, "Through 2008, the creation of an accurate, timely and rich single view of the customer across channels and lines of business will be a key enabler for reducing costs, managing risk and increasing revenue and profitability in customer-centric organisations."

Delivering customer information through a central master customer information database or "hub" using customer data integration (CDI) technology will ensure better success in the delivery of e-Services.

The Big Picture - Enterprise Integration

We use the term "Enterprise Integration" to describe broadly integration of the various activities at the enterprise level, not only in the IT sense, but including the organisational, business processes, and other business-level aspects.

Enterprise integration has indeed several dimensions to it. For the purpose of this section, we will focus on the "application" and "information" dimensions and, consequently, the relationships between Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Enterprise Information Integration (EII).

EII, and its relationship with EAI, is fast becoming recognised an area which must be understood to provide a data integration across an organisation. Furthermore, EAI, Web Services, and EII are no longer being treated as separate domains but, instead, as directly related elements of an organisation’s overall IT strategy.

Green Hat’s perspective

Data integration is not just about matching and linking data together. It's also about gaining access to the right data sources at the right time. Data integration means working within your existing application environment to ensure that high quality information arrives at new data targets during data migration or consolidation efforts.

From our experience of architecture, we consider EII and EAI to be the two key facets of integration. We consider EII as the "data-oriented" aspect of integration and EAI as the "application-oriented" aspect. To deliver a complete Enterprise Architecture solution, it is important to have a 360º perspective of integration.

To deliver a successful business initiative that relies on consistent, accurate and reliable data, you face two primary challenges:

discovering the true state of your data and
integrating enterprise data onto a single, reliable platform.

An effective data integration strategy can lower costs and improve productivity by ensuring the consistency, accuracy and reliability of data across your enterprise.

Green Hat can advise on how best to architect, develop and deliver a CDI solution for your organisation.

White paper

Green Hat will be adding a white paper discussing the issue of EII and CDI in relation to Enterprise Architecture, SOA and Web Services.