Oracle Fusion Whats the Story now – July 2011

Dears,

For years, Oracle customers have been waiting for Fusion Applications, the result of Oracle's nearly decade-long acquisition spree. With Fusion Applications, Oracle promised to bring together the best functionality of all the acquired software under one architecture and one suite.

Before we move further check the Oracle Fusion Demo in YouTube

Part 1

Part 2

After half-dozen years in development, Oracle Fusion Applications have quietly arrived. The company has worked with enterprises this year through its Early Adopter Program, but the first major clue that Fusion Applications was generally available came last month when Oracle published its “Oracle Fusion Applications Global Price List” with little fanfare.Also in June, Richard Bingham's book Managing Oracle Fusion Applications http://www.mhprofessional.com/product.php?isbn=0071750339&cat=7 was published by Oracle Press.

Many still think Oracle Fusion Applications aren't yet generally available, but according to Paul Hamerman, vice president and principal analyst of enterprise applications for Forrester Research Inc., the reality is different."Oracle Fusion Applications is generally available, and anyone who wants to buy Fusion can buy it right now; Oracle has just kind of had a soft launch," he said. Hamerman added that there are several deployment options -- including hosted, Software as a Service (SaaS) and on-premises -- as well as migrations from other platforms.While there are quite a few different possible deployment and component deployment options, "Oracle will take anybody at this point who wants to implement it.

Oracle Fusion Applications opening up at Open World 2011

Oracle is really gearing up to make Oracle Fusion Applications a big part of OpenWorld, its large annual conference held in the fall. He expects Oracle to be sharing customer case studies and giving previews. Customer interest in Fusion Apps is lukewarm at this time..More interest will likely materialize when live, reference-able customers are available.

We see a lot of interest in the market for components of Oracle's Fusion Apps..Only a few are looking for a full suite, but there is some interest among Greenfield clients.

With the co-existence strategy, customers do not have to rip out and replace their existing apps. "E-Business, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel … are all still viable products, any of which can be enhanced with pieces of the Fusion Apps product line. In fact, many customers will opt to stick with those product lines and take a pass on Fusion Applications . . . which absolutely is the right choice if a customer does not see significant business value in Fusion Apps.

Oracle Fusion Applications can be difficult to evaluate because they’re made up of many components and pricing options. For example, Fusion Financials for a single application user comes in at $4,595 with a five-user minimum. But the Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management Fusion CRM Base (for sales) comes in at $4,910 with a 100-user minimum. And then the Fusion Email Marketing Server is $115,000, sold on a per-server basis. There are many pieces and parts to understand, and piecemeal, it turns out, will likely be the dominant rollout strategy going forward for quite some time.

The customers are concerned about pricing, especially regarding unknowns around migrating from other Oracle products. While Oracle has released a basic price list, I think that's just an initial step in an evolving pricing strategy that will evolve as the market responds and as different situations are encountered.

 

Loving P&C

DC*

Oracle CRM on Demand Integration, the Cloud Connection – Part 2

Dears,

This is the second part of the article  "Oracle CRM on Demand Integration, the Cloud Connection – Part 1"

Standards-Based Foundation for Integration


Companies have made wide ranging investments in their existing application infrastructure and want to preserve these assets while maximizing return on investment. Leveraging industry standards such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and Web services meets this goal by providing a common framework for applications to communicate and coordinate activities across a business process. BPEL enables organizations to not only quickly assemble a set of discrete services into an end-to-end process flow but also to rapidly modify processes as business conditions change.

Oracle takes such an approach to integration by leveraging its Application Integration Architecture (AIA), an open, standards-based platform for managing business processes across Oracle and other packaged and custom applications. AIA leverages open standards and a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to deliver industry best practices and operational governance capabilities to help organizations build integrated industry processes, regardless of the applications involved. Using AIA as a framework, organizations can link Oracle CRM On Demand with market leading applications, leveraging a best-in-class technology foundation and industry leading best practices. Built using Oracle Fusion Middleware and BPEL, and based on a common data model, these processes are extensible, repeatable, and sustainable.

The Three Tiers of Integration for a Virtual Application Suite

Organizations want their array of applications to behave as a unified application suite. To achieve this goal requires the ability to fully integrate applications across data, user interface, and business process layers. To integrate at just one of these tiers is limiting – a seamless integration requires a combination of all three.

• Data. The most basic form of integration involves the data layer via Web services, batch integration, and data import and export. More critical information, such as customer and product data, needs to be appropriately synchronized in real-time or accessed regardless of where the data originally resides to ensure that users can access the latest information from any source without fear of duplication. It is critical to have real-time flow for data such as accounts, contacts and products, where information frequently changes. For instance, customer orders can be delayed or even lost if account shipping information in CRM and ERP systems are not kept up-to-date, severely impacting customer satisfaction.

• User Interface. A more highly developed integration involves the user interface layer where advanced integration extensions enable usability features like mashups and web links to embed custom HTML and third party content within the Oracle CRM On Demand user interface. As a result, users can view information from other applications within a single user interface, vastly improving usability and user productivity. Users can interact with content through one application rather than needing to navigate across multiple applications. Because users can access back office information – such as products and quotes – from the front office application, less time needs to be spent training salespeople on multiple applications. And sales users have more information available at the point of interaction with their customers, enabling a better service experience.

• Business Processes. The highest level of integration involves business processes that span across applications. In addition to business process orchestration, business logic, such as data validation rules, need coordination as well to ensure consistency throughout the entire process. Business processes based on BPEL are the key enabler for adopting a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), enabling steps in a business process to be stitched together across applications to form a complete, end-to-end flow. By leveraging business process integration, Organizations can build processes around the customer that span application boundaries rather than conforming to integration constraints. With business process integration, a complete business flow such as lead conversion can reconcile account information from a lead in a CRM application with similar information in an ERP system, eliminate redundant and duplicate data, and automatically convert the lead to an opportunity. Rather than change the application when business needs change – which can be a lengthy process –organizations can simply alter the business process in real time to adjust to changing dynamics. By effectively mixing and matching these integration tiers, organizations can move beyond just managing application data. Customers can reach a desired business outcome, which minimizes duplication of data, leverages information wherever it is stored, and provides a seamless user experience with no need for the user to be aware of application boundaries. A complete view of the customer, regardless of how the data is stored or dispersed across the enterprise, arms salespeople with the critical information they need – such as quotes, orders, and invoices – via a single point of interaction.

A Blueprint for Integration

One of the benefits of the Process Integration Packs is they provide a blueprint or template for integration, enabling organizations to duplicate the capabilities of an integration pack for other applications. If an organization is not using a particular Oracle product and would prefer to instead integrate with a custom or third party application, that option is available. For example, if an organization chooses to use a custom quoting application rather than the quoting module in Oracle E-Business Suite to build an opportunity-to-quote business flow, the integration pack can be used as a template to swap the custom application in its place. The ability to use these integration packs as a model enables organizations to adapt to specific scenarios in a business process.

Prebuilt Process Integration Packs

The Oracle CRM On Demand Process Integration Pack for Oracle E-Business and Oracle CRM On Demand Process Integration Pack for JD Edwards Enterprise One combine key business processes between Oracle’s on demand CRM solution and Oracle’s leading ERP solutions. From a business process perspective, these integration packs streamline the Opportunity-to-Quote and Lead-to-Order business processes and support the auto-conversion of leads to opportunities and opportunity information captured in Oracle CRM On Demand to a quote or order in Oracle E-Business Suite or JD Edwards Enterprise One. At the user interface level, sales representatives can easily view back office data within the context and look and feel of the Oracle CRM on Demand application. Finally, from the data perspective, users interact with the most up-to-date information, through real-time synchronization of key information like customer and product information.

Integration with Oracle Data Quality Management ensures data is appropriately validated to eliminate redundant information and that all systems have consistent data. While some information, such as product and customer information, is synchronized between the two systems, other information, such as quotes and orders, can simply be leveraged from its source and displayed in Oracle CRM On Demand; thus, data can reside in Oracle CRM On Demand, in a back office application, or shared between the two. As a result of this integration combination, users can complete an entire business flow and interact with both front and back office information – all within he context and look and feel of the Oracle CRM on Demand application.

Direct Integrations

In addition to Process Integration Packs, Oracle also offers prebuilt direct integrations to manage data flows between systems. These prebuilt direct integrations offer organizations the benefits of an AIA solution built on open standards to reduce costs, minimize risk, and speed time to market. The Oracle CRM On Demand Integration to Siebel CRM provides a single customer view across on premise and on demand deployments by synchronizing data between Oracle’s Siebel CRM and multiple instances of Oracle CRM On Demand.

Loving P&C
DC*

Oracle CRM on Demand Integration, the Cloud Connection – Part 1

Dears,


Companies invest in best-of-breed solutions, whether on demand or on premise, to optimize best practices within each application’s domain. The challenge is in integrating these solutions. Enterprises may want to integrate an on demand CRM application with an on premise ERP system to gain greater agility and user adoption within sales teams while also leveraging existing systems for order fulfillment and accounting. Or there may be a need to integrate a department’s on demand CRM solution with an established on premise CRM system in use elsewhere within the organization. Unfortunately, these applications typically operate as silos, disconnected from the actions of the other. Therefore, linking them to achieve an end-to-end business process has been a difficult-to-attain goal.

For an enterprise to fully leverage its investments in various domain applications such as CRM, order management, and supply chain management, it must ensure comprehensive integration across data, user interface (UI), and business process levels – transforming a portfolio of disparate applications into a unified, virtual

Application suite. Only then will users be able to complete a business transaction from a single application UI and interact with the latest information, regardless of where the data is stored or how it is synchronized. Without a complete integration, the user experience will remain disjointed, unsatisfying, and inefficient. This white paper discusses current integration challenges facing businesses with mixed deployments and presents Oracle’s vision and solution for comprehensive integration with Oracle CRM On Demand.

Present Integration Challenges

Today larger organizations in particular are considering on demand applications for the flexibility a subscription-based offering provides to internal lines of business. For example, an organization may want telesales representatives to have an on demand solution for automating sales processes and centralizing lead, opportunity, and account information while customer service representatives have access to an on premise CRM solution with highly robust inbound and outbound call center capabilities. The true potential of any new application investment – be it on demand or on premise, front or back office – is realized when information readily flows across applications to support a streamlined business process. The problem is that applications often operate within silos, inhibiting collaboration and coordination across repositories of information and reducing sales, marketing, and service effectiveness. For example, attempts to integrate an on demand CRM solution with a well established on premise CRM system risks fragmenting key customer data and undermining the effectiveness of these systems. Or, efforts to introduce a new on demand CRM solution to support the roll out of a new sales force, while at the same time relying on an existing on premise ERP system for order fulfillment and accounting, could have potentially disastrous consequences with customer orders and invoices. To accommodate for these shortcomings, organizations endure suboptimal processes that conform to integration restrictions rather than streamlining practices that increase business productivity and sales efficiency. The result is a disjointed user experience, increased administrative burdens on sales representatives, and ultimately, reduced sales effectiveness. Because data stored in one system is not synchronized or shared with another, organizations risk having outdated or even inaccurate information displayed to sales users. When information is not readily available through a single application, salespeople are forced to toggle between applications to access and interact with relevant data such as leads, quotes, product information, and service requests. As a result, sales representatives are forced to spend time out of their busy day reconciling information and manually reentering data in other applications to make up for the functional disparity, increasing the chance for inaccurate and redundant customer information to be incorporated within an organization’s information systems. Furthermore, this administrative overhead reduces the time salespeople have available to spend with prospects and customers, affecting overall sales productivity. What organizations need is a virtual suite of applications that behave and interoperate as a single entity.



As the adoption of on demand solutions continues to grow, hybrid combinations of on demand and on premise installations within an enterprise will become more common. These instances run the risk of becoming isolated application silos without the means to easily and effectively link to the wider application network. Integration attempts are complicated by the following factors:


• Increase in environment complexity. Different business units and geographies of an enterprise can have different systems, and these systems can be a mix of custom, packaged, on premise, and on demand. Consequently, customer information is often fragmented across various repositories and difficult to incorporate into a single view.

• Different vendors, different architectures. With multiple systems often comes varying architectures from multiple vendors. Proprietary data models, standards, and interfaces may be used, making integration across these unrelated applications even more difficult. Integration of multiple proprietary platforms is further complicated by divergent roadmaps and uncoordinated release cycles.



• Expensive do-it-yourself integrations. As a result of the lack of standards based architectures and prebuilt integrations, organizations are forced to undertake the costly process of building custom integrations that are not easily adaptable, extendable, or upgradeable.



• Insufficient integration depth. Most integration efforts are often limited to the data level as more sophisticated UI and business process integration efforts prove to be more challenging. However, only through a holistic integration approach at the data, UI, and business process levels can organizations reap the true potential and return on investment of connecting best-of-breed applications. A user experience cannot be seamless if a user needs to toggle between applications and re-enter information that was already captured in another system. For example, re-entering account information on an order stored in the back office when that information is already captured in the front office is a time-consuming and error-prone exercise for the user. Organizations already struggling with the challenge of linking together disparate applications face extra complexity with the addition of on demand deployments. Companies find they cannot adjust to new business requirements easily and cost effectively. Users experience difficulty completing a single business transaction, often because such activities require needless toggling between various applications, and thus additional user training. Most importantly, users do not have access to the complete set of information they need to do their jobs. For example, without the ability to easily view past orders stored in a back office system while working on an opportunity in a CRM application, a sales representative may miss invaluable up-sell or cross-sell opportunities. Users cannot tap into the true potential of CRM without the ability to share and communicate information seamlessly with other applications.

RESOLVING THE INTEGRATION DILEMMA

The lack of a robust standards-based architecture, an incomplete integration strategy, and lack of prebuilt integration make such efforts costly, time-consuming, and unsustainable. To remedy this requires an integration approach that leverages an open, standards-based platform for extending, managing, and modifying end-to end business processes across packaged and custom applications. The strategy for integration needs to be comprehensive, to ensure seamless coordination across the data, user interface, and business process tiers and deliver a virtual application suite. And finally, prebuilt, sustainable integrations between common industry applications are needed to accelerate the time to achieve business value, facilitate integration efforts, and reduce costs with minimal risk.

The second part of this article would provide the insight about the integration options.

Loving P&C
DC*

Master the Data Governance before Mastering the Customer Hub

Dears,

 

Recently, many a large enterprise has embarked on a Customer Hub initiative to gain unified views of its customers and their relationships across products, locations and business lines. With the demand for data integration hubs increasing in the past few years, several CUSTOMER HUB vendors now vie for a leadership position in the emerging market. As these vendors offer an array of packaged solutions with rich features and services, it is easy to lose sight of the most fundamental requirement of a CUSTOMER HUB hub – sound customer data management. Creating unified customer views across conflicting, disparate data sources is the raison de être for all CUSTOMER HUB implementations; therefore, ensuring that the data in the hub is reliably consolidated, its exceptions properly stewarded and data policies properly implemented – in short, the data is well governed – has to be one of the most critical requirements of the solution. Yet, companies often evaluate these data governance capabilities inadequately in their vendor selection process only to regret their decision later in the implementation phase.

 

 

Therefore, it is critical for enterprises to review the architecture of a CUSTOMER HUB solution closely to determine whether it meets all their data governance needs in the long run. So, as you embark on a solution, consider these three factors that underlie data governance capabilities:

• Data reliability,
•  Data stewardship
•  Governance regimes

Ensure  these 3 are all part of a flexible architecture platform.

 

Data Reliability: Built-in or Bolted-on?

 

Most application-centric CUSTOMER HUB solutions that focus primarily on the operational use of data often underestimate the harder challenges of building a reliable high-volume customer hub in the first place or of managing different data governance regimes across multiple lines of business. While external tools can be loosely integrated to such solutions to cleanse and match data, the more intractable problem is that of merging matched records to create the “best of breed” master record for each customer. Essentially, a CUSTOMER HUB solution that promises a scalable, operational hub but has bolted-on data quality tools is going to incur ever increasing costs for data management over time.

 

In order to deliver a “golden” or master record for each customer and its various affiliations, a system must dynamically assess reliability across all data sources – based on user-defined parameters and intrinsic data properties – and ensure that only the most reliable content survives at the cell-level of the master record. For instance, if the call center begins collecting email addresses when confirming orders, this data attribute may be more reliable than the email addresses submitted by customers at the website. The ability to rapidly adjust the system to survive the call center email address over the website email address is a critical architectural component of any CUSTOMER HUB system. Moreover, such cell-level survivorship for data reliability must be built into the core product architecture and should not be sacrificed as the customer hub scales to millions of customers. Ultimately, how well the end-users accept a customer data hub depends on sustaining high level of data reliability, even as the hub grows in volume or as new data sources are added.

 

Data Stewardship: Out of the Box or Custom?

 

A business cannot implement an operational customer hub in the absence of data stewardship ― as soon as data begins to flow through the supported business processes, exceptions and errors begin to flow as well. Therefore, any customer hub acting as a data integration platform must offer business capabilities to monitor and handle such exceptions either by business analysts and end-users or by anyone designated as a data steward.

 

Today, many CUSTOMER HUB solutions overlook the real-time configurable rules needed to trigger alerts about the exceptions that are created during data flow. Often managing such exceptions requires full user interfaces for complex data stewardship tasks such as investigating the history and lineage of certain master records in question. This may be the only way to ensure that the user acceptance and data hub reliability remains high. In other circumstances, an enterprise may choose to build a specific user interface against the programming interfaces of the master hub in order to suit its needs. In either case, an adaptive solution must deliver rules-based configurability with best-in-class data stewardship consoles as well as programming interfaces to handle all data exception and reliability needs.

 

Data Governance Regime: Central, Distributed or Both?

 

Most CUSTOMER HUB solutions are designed to create a single silo, an operational hub to serve a handful of applications, as opposed to one that can scale to the needs of the enterprise. While a focused deployment may be the desired option for central data governance, it usually does not address all the business needs for governance and compliance across an enterprise. Often, certain data attributes (such as privacy preferences) need central control and exception handling whereas other attributes are best left under local management. In addition, security and access to data attributes in the hub will vary by individual roles within each organization and by organization at large. In fact, to support the broad range of business requirements across business lines, there may be multiple data governance regimes required for different data attributes, all within a single enterprise.

 

An adaptive approach must be based on a distributed architecture whereby multiple hubs can be deployed to integrate different data sources and support different processes, yet be able to share data across one another based on any number of hub-and-spoke or peer-to-peer governance regimes. This offers a line of business yet another dimension of flexibility to share some but not all data – each based on its own data reliability and governance policies. With full rules-based configurability and data stewardship interfaces, a broad range of data governance regimes can be supported.

 

Data Governance Requirements: Coded or Configurable?

 

As the pace of change in business continues to increase, so does the complexity of maintaining data quality and reliability across the enterprise. In master data hubs that are custom-built or based on fixed models, it is very difficult to implement changes in either business logic or process because the rules reflecting the business conditions and requirements are usually custom-coded or tightly bound to the underlying fixed data model. In order to automate the consolidation of customer data in an intelligent and ongoing manner and maintain the highest level of data quality and reliability in the face of business changes, it is critical for an enterprise to be able to manage the repeatable business rules for its data cleanse, match and merge processes effectively.

 

Consequently, an adaptive master data solution must capture and manage these changing business conditions without the IT team having to custom code these rules each time change is desired. In addition, all the business rules for data consolidation, change detection, and write backs must be easily configured and modified rapidly, without additional programming, to reflect specific business conditions and the associated data needs. This results in a solution that can be governed as business changes occur during the normal course of operation, without compromising the data integrity across multiple source systems.

 

In summary, data must be the central focus of any CUSTOMER HUB project, and data reliability, stewardship and governance regime must never be an after-thought of a comprehensive CUSTOMER HUB solution. Enterprises must closely review the details of a vendor’s offering in this area to reduce their risk of project failure and the total cost of CUSTOMER HUB implementation

 

Loving P&C
DC*

Mastering the Mysteries of Customer Hub (MDM) Projects

Dears,


In a world where customer acquisition costs are soaring and customer retention - particularly retaining profitable ones - is getting harder for every enterprise, “knowing your customer” is not just a slogan but a business mandate. However, in order to truly know its customers, an enterprise needs to create a unified and comprehensive customer view from all its disparate data sources, including customer databases and customer information files, financial and order management systems, product catalogs, and external data services. Once integrated, these unified customer views provide the entire enterprise with the ability to drive customer-centric strategies. However, using existing technology platforms to build and manage such unified customer views—across disparate data sources, applications and channels—can be a complex and costly exercise and often achieves only limited success.

One of the primary culprits driving the astronomical expense, and often failure, of customer master data hub projects is the lack of flexibility in the underlying data model of the solution. This is especially true for CUSTOMER HUB vendors who have anchored their solution around existing applications such as Customer Relationship Management applications or around a fixed industry data model such as retail banking or insurance. This lack of flexibility becomes their Achilles heel, as significant customization is often required to enable the data model to reflect the existing systems and business requirements. With a heavily modified data model, the business services that sit on top of it break, along with any management logic that is bound to the fixed data structures. Further, with no flexibility in limiting the scope of customer data types that must be modeled within the customer hub, the project becomes much larger than necessary, which adds to the overall risk of failure. Therefore, it is critical for companies to review the data model flexibility of various CUSTOMER HUB solutions to ensure success of their projects both in the short and long term. The following provides some of the key factors to consider when determining if a data model is flexible:

Data Model: Brittle or Extensible?

Since a customer hub is highly specific to each enterprise – in fact to each business unit within the enterprise – the critical question is not whether an out-of-the-box data model is “rich”. In fact, like a pre-fixed menu at an expensive restaurant, it may well be too rich with extraneous attributes not appropriate for a scalable master hub. The essential question is: how readily does the solution permit the data model to be modified? Most CUSTOMER HUB solutions offer a fixed albeit rich data model developed from their unique application perspective. When these solutions attempt to adapt this to the true needs of a business outside their original design framework, the model either cannot provide the entity and relationship structures necessary or it requires extensive and expensive customization. Also, once complete, the resulting data model is highly inefficient due to the processing burdens associated with combining the existing application logic and the modified model. Ideally, an adaptive CUSTOMER HUB solution must offer an initial data model specific to each industry vertical – or allow any proven data model to be imported – that can be further modified to reflect the exact business entities needed to be modeled for the customer hub. In addition, it must supply all the supporting data management services, including extensive metadata management, to facilitate the model’s extension and changes over time. The net result is a relevant, highly specific data model that fits the project needs from inception without forcing an enterprise to standardize on a fixed data model.

Business Services: Customized or Composed?

A CUSTOMER HUB solution based on a fixed data model may claim to offer a layer of abstract business services that can be used out-of-the-box for integration. However, these business services are “brittle” and need to be customized if the underlying data model is modified. Therefore, in an implementation, after a fixed data model is customized and de-normalized, there may be only a handful of relevant business services remaining. Worse, even these business services may require customization, and the more such a solution is customized the harder it is to migrate to future product upgrades. Instead, an adaptive architecture must offer a set of granular data integration services, including a full set of APIs, in a services integration framework that may be used to compose only the relevant higher-order business services. These business services and the APIs are maintained for a smooth path to product upgrades. This approach offers a wide variety of methods within a service-oriented architecture for sharing all the data entities based on rules within the hub – at various levels of abstraction–with downstream systems.

Data Types: Which Ones to Model?

Each customer data type – master reference data, relationship data, and transaction data – has separate characteristics and challenges and therefore requires different treatment within the CUSTOMER HUB solution. For example, reference data that exists in every system or data repository is often duplicated, conflicting and does not have a system-of-record. On the other hand, transaction data usually does have a system-of-record; consequently, there is little conflict during reconciliation. Also, while reference data is a very small subset of customer data and hence has smaller volume, the volume for transaction data can be very large, requiring a substantial investment in infrastructure to store the replicated data from source systems. Relationship data can only be managed effectively after the underlying conflicts of reference data have been resolved. Further, and for proper management, relationship data and its groupings (like households) also require sophisticated visualization tools to display the complex relationships between entities.

A fixed data model approach offers an enticing, extensive application-level data model whereby all customer attributes – master data, relationship data and transaction data – are fully encapsulated in the model for the hub. This fully persistent approach requires many customer attributes to be duplicated and stored in the customer hub. Conversely, an adaptive approach must permit the data model to be segmented in such a way that only the core master data and relationship data attributes are modeled and stored in the customer master hub. The transaction data is addressed based on where it most appropriately resides given the characteristics of the underlying source system. For example, if the source systems are batch oriented, have no real-time interfaces, or have system load limitations – yet already provide data extracts at regular intervals – the transaction data may reside in an operational data store that is accessed by the Hub dynamically. On the other hand, if source systems possess real-time integration capabilities and are not under severe system loads, the transaction data may be harvested dynamically and cached within the hub for low latency and high availability, removing the need to unnecessarily duplicate source system data in a separate repository. This flexibility can dramatically reduce the volume of data required to be stored in the customer data hub, which reduces the total cost of ownership while increasing the system’s ability to flexibly deliver data in any form, on demand.

Data Model Choice Affects Scalability

Lastly, data model flexibility also has a significant impact on the scalability and performance of the CUSTOMER HUB solution. Because the fixed data model solution usually tunes the model a priori to support the native applications, the performance and scalability parameters available to your organization are already constrained by the vendor’s need to support its application architecture. In contrast, to the flexible data model approach, once the model is configured, all the tuning and normalization is done to support the specific scalability and performance requirements of the master data hub project and related consuming applications – not just to support a single vendor’s application. This difference in approach to scalability can have significant effects across the entire data lifecycle of building, using, managing and extending a master data hub. Recently, the myth that an adaptive solution requires a compromise on performance was dispelled with CUSTOMER HUB Benchmarking Results, providing evidence of high performance and scalability – all within an adaptive, extensible architecture.

CUSTOMER HUB Benchmarking Results

In summary, data model flexibility is a critical part of an adaptive CUSTOMER HUB architecture. An enterprise looking to mitigate risk of their CUSTOMER HUB implementation should consider the full effects of their data model choice across several factors outlined above. A wrong decision in this area can increase the project cost, reduce its manageability over time, or in the worst case, doom the entire initiative.

Loving P&C
DC*

Customer Advocacy

Dears,

This week I received a note of appreciation from one of my reputed customer in the consumer goods space and this mail is kind of enlightenment to me and my colleagues and when we traced back all that extra mile things we have done for this customer it is nothing more than customer advocacy where we enabled him to make the right decision at the right time. So what this customer advocacy is all about ?

Advocacy means you faithfully represent your customer’s interests and provide them with honest information, even if that means they end up buying products from someone else. It requires that you have transparency and engage in a dialogue with customers. Advocacy also demands you invest more in Product/service quality and less in promotion and advertising. The traditional business model is companies market and advertises their products in an effort to get customers to buy. The customer is then expected to evaluate the offerings of all vendors and purchase whatever provides them with the best combination of price, value and quality. Each buyer is expected to look out for their own interests.

Advocacy means you provide customers and prospects with open, accurate and complete information about what you have to offer and what your competitors have to offer. You then provide advice so customers can find the best products, even if they buy from someone else. The point is customers will learn the truth anyway, so by providing them with accurate information and embracing honesty, you can earn their purchase. This will be a dialogue rather than a one-way monologue where you speak at customers. Advocacy effectively means you go into partnership with your customers in the expectation satisfied customers will tell others about the positive partnership you have formed with them.

In many ways, advocacy is a major step forward in the evolution of the relationship between a firm and its customers. Previous steps in this evolutionary process have been:

• Total Quality Management (TQM) means you develop products that are good enough for customers to be willing to recommend to others.

• Customer satisfaction programs focus on giving customers more of what they want.

• Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) emphasizes one-to-one personalized marketing based on known preferences. CRM usually requires building a huge warehouse of information and then mining the data to present customers with offers they are predisposed to accept. If used too regularly, however, CRM can become intrusive and aggressive for customers.

• Advocacy – becoming a trusted representative of your customer’s best interests – is the next natural step. Under this approach, you give customers open, honest and completely transparent information. You will only earn a sale if your products are better than those offered by the competition. Your main focus, then, is to design and develop better offerings rather than spending money attempting to attract a prospective customer’s attention.
Advocacy requires a mutual and reciprocal dialogue to develop. You help customers buy the best products they can and in return they tell others about this positive relationship. Over time, this will

mean your customer acquisition costs will decline in sync with growing customer preference for your product. Push marketing was driven by the economics of mass production. Relationship marketing was propelled by the saturation of push marketing and the intense marketplace rivalries which have emerged. Advocacy will be driven by the accelerating growth of customer power in the foreseeable future.

The key benefits of customer advocacy are:

• Enhanced trust – advocacy increases customer loyalty because satisfied customers are more likely to be repeat buyers, and they are more likely to recruit their friends to buy as well. _ Reduced new customer acquisition costs – Advocacy relies on word-of-mouth endorsements, and each customer will do more business because of the trust factor. Customers are also more likely to stay in an advocacy-based environment.

• Higher profit margins – Greater trust means you can charge customers more because you can establish definitively you are providing more value.

• A foundation for future growth – Advocacy will help you diversify and expand your share of the customer’s wallet because you’ll be a trusted provider. This will facilitate up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

• Long-term competitive advantage – Advocacy is based around a consultative relationship. Instead of needing to guess what additional products customers want, you can ask them. This will allow you to develop future products that will be very successful. This relationship will be especially valuable

• When the commercial environment as a whole is turbulent.



The increased customer power which underpins customer advocacy strategies is now being felt in a number of industries. A number of new ideas are being tried to respond to the decreasing effectiveness of the traditional push marketing tactics. You need to take on board the lessons already learned in the marketplace and move forward rather than futilely attempting to retain the status quo. Take for examples the Automobile and Travel Industry



The Automobile Industry



Long noted for pushy sales tactics, before the Web the dealer’s sales representatives had greater power because they had more information about inventory levels, dealer costs and quality ratings. With the Web, customers are much better informed meaning they can make better decisions. They can walk into a dealership knowing the vehicle they want, what stock level the dealer has on hand ready to sell, what the dealer paid and which other nearby dealers they are willing to go to if

negotiations at the first dealership don’t result in an acceptable deal. Research has shown that better informed customers now save on average $450 when purchasing a vehicle. To respond to greater customer power, vehicle manufacturers are attempting to cultivate better relationships with customers.



General Motors, for example, has created a Web site called AutoChoiceAdvisor.com in partnership with J.D. Powers, an independent third-party assessor of vehicle quality. The advisor asks a series of questions and then produces a ranked list of the top eight vehicles that will best fit the customer’s needs and preferences. The site advocates all models rather than just GM vehicles. Customers can then arrange to have a 24-hour test drive of the vehicles they are considering buying through the

Web site. The industry’s approach to marketing to customers is now shifting significantly towards trust-based ideas and initiatives rather than push tactics.

The Travel Industry

In the early 70’s business travelers were the mainstay of the airlines. This changed in the 1980s and 1990s when leisure travelers came to the fore and industry capacity grew. Airlines resorted to load management pricing which meant pricing became very complex and time sensitive. The entrance of discount airlines further intensified this trend. At the same time, Web-based third parties (Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity) were established to help customers price-shop when it comes to planning their travel. This greater amount of information has meant many more customers:

• Decide their own trade-offs between price and quality.

• Do their own bookings rather than use a travel agent.

• Can aggregate their travel expenditure to get better deals.

The travel industry itself is responding to this increased customer power by offering open and honest information via the Web along with more options, better advice, simplified procedures

and more personalized service for those who want it. It does appear the Web based third-parties are here to stay, however, as these companies are profitable and some even have market capitalizations greater than many airlines. Consumers can now get better deals and can choose to use a travel agent, to use an online service or to go to each airline direct through its Web site.

Loving P&C
DC*

Inspire the Next

Dears,

‘Inspire the Next’ Hitachi’s slogan. As soon as I saw it, I was like, WOW, I am going to have to write that down and do a blog about that and so here I am, writing a blog about how we are all capable of inspiring the next person/generation/Government/fashion trend etc. And notice how I have emphasized ‘we are all capable.’ Everyone is. Not just the rich. Not just the popular. Not just the pretty. And not just the celebrities & Sportsmen. We can all inspire the next….

And the reason this is, is because we are all equally powerful and we can all make a difference to what comes next. Unfortunately, all too often our power is either hidden away and forgotten about or used for the wrong purpose. We have been brought up with a media which tells us that only the rich, beautiful, intelligent and privileged have power therefore we believe that us mere mortals don’t have any power to change things or make a difference and this disempowered belief leads to some of those people placing a lesser value on themselves and therefore they excessively drink, do drugs or have low aspirations. They do not realize how powerful they are. And they do not realize how they INSPIRE THE NEXT.

The other extreme is when people use their power for the wrong reasons. These people are aware of their power to such an extent that they cause harm, upset & pain to others so that they can increase their power. Or are so scared of their power that they try and block it away by excessively drinking, taking drugs and partaking in reckless behaviour. Some may but some may not realize how they INSPIRE THE NEXT.

What this all boils down to in essence is that, you and me, Brad Pitt & Angelina, Peter Crouch & Wayne Rooney, Richard Branson & Sir Philip Green, Paris Hilton & Britney Spears and your postman & milkman have the same responsibility whilst we are on this planet. That is to inspire the next. To be a role model to the next. To pass on something good, beneficial, worthy to the next. To inspire the next.

And we can all do this. It doesn’t matter if you are a brain surgeon or a Software Consultant. We all have the same responsibility to be a good role model to the next and pass on to to them good practice. And it can be as simple as spending 10 minutes explaining to a child why it is wrong to fight or telling your friend to not be too devastated after a break up. These simple words may not take long for you to say or feel like they will change the world but could quite possibly inspire and impact another’s life in a dramatically EXTRODINARY way. And you can make this happen!

Me working with young talents emphasizes this need to be a good role model even more so. Young people are our next generation. We want our next generation (and even this generation) to be made up of decent, kind, nice, compassionate, caring, honorable, successful people but how is this going to happen if they grow up with role models who fight, drink all their salary away at the weekend, swear, are abusive, hate, fear, have no ambition and no respect for themselves, others or the world they are in?!? Young people learn from what they see & from what they are told. And young people will only respect those who are consistent with their behaviors and actions. Be their actions good or bad. So if you don’t practice what you preach, don’t bother preaching at all. And this is said by someone who knows and has had to change her ways in order to be a good role model.

To be a good role model isn’t the easier option. To be a bad role model is far easier. It doesn’t take much to be a bad role model. All you have to do is nothing. Not care. Not put any effort in. Think only of yourself and not realize/care about how you inspire the next. Bad role models don’t realize how powerful they. For whatever reason. So I am here to say, move those mountains, lift those limits off your life and realize how POWERFUL, WORTHY AND OF HIGH VALUE YOU ARE! AND HOW YOU, YES YOU, CAN INSPIRE THE NEXT.

When you realize this, when you realize your power, your value, your worth and that you are indeed an asset to this life, you realize that what you say, do, think and act like impacts those around you and can either inspire them to do something good or give them reason to do something bad. It’s your choice. And it’s within your control. You can inspire your mom, your dad, your brother/sister, your children, your friends, your neighbors, your work colleagues, even the little old lady at 56. You CAN inspire them If you so choose.

So what will it be??! Will you inspire the next?!?! I know what I will be doing. I will be INSPIRING GREATNESS, GOODNESS, COMPASSION, POSITIVITY and SUCCESS AND leaving my mark on the next and this lifetime.

Inspiring your next success! We are Hitachi Consulting

Loving P&C

DC*