We, the People

Before you can tackle the technical aspects of eai, you must unite the people involved

By Moshe Japha

What Is a Customer?

Once an EAI project has organizational momentum, one of the first inevitable questions is "where do you start?" Most organizations, trying to reach the ideal of customer orientation and CRM, will respond, "The customer, of course!"

But just what is a customer? If you ask someone from accounts receivable, you may hear, "Every account I send a bill to is a customer." To which the marketing folks may reply, "But Conglomo Enterprises Inc. has 25 different accounts with us in 10 states and a few more in Canada. As far as I'm concerned, it's one customer, not 25!"

Then the vice president of Sales pipes up, "But I need to keep track of Conglomo as different customers because I have 10 different sales reps calling on it, each in their own territory. I'd love to be able to treat it as one customer, but my sales system won't pay commissions to sales reps in different territories if it's entered that way. In fact, I'd really love to have an organizational cross-section of such a large company, so I can sell to each area appropriately."

You and the whole team of very rational business people have become hamstrung by the suddenly enigmatic question, "Just what is a customer?"

Now assume that through generous use of your world-class facilitation skills, by the time the team breaks for lunch, you have arrived at a consensus for defining a customer. You've all agreed to define the customer at the most granular level, with all of the hierarchical relationships applicable in the real world somehow tracked and managed by the systems integration folks.

Business Decisions

Everyone is feeling very accomplished until your IT representative speaks up, "Fine. We're up to the challenge. But how are we going to match billing customers to marketing, sales, and call center customers?" As the glassy-eyed faces around the room echo in unspoken incredulity, one voice ventures, "I thought you had tools that can do that automatically?"

The IT representative replies, "Oh, some spiffy tools are available, but they can't make business decisions. Depending on how tight you want the matching parameters, you still need a decent amount of manual matching."

Similar names may actually be different spellings of the same company (Ford and Ford Motor Company) or different companies altogether (Ford may refer to Ford Street Garage and Diner). Addresses, phone numbers, and contact names all help, but still are not perfectly analyzed by automated tools. The IT department needs help understanding the business rules governing how to define the same customer, which returns the ball squarely to the business' court. The sidebar, "A Model Customer," illustrates the complexity of the customer structure.

By the end of the afternoon session, everyone realizes that the original question - "Where do we start?" - remains unanswered. You can't just integrate customers; you need to pull in addresses and contact information just to match customers. That means reconciling different spellings of names and addresses and inconsistently updated data, and dealing with some very old systems to boot.

The IT representative sheepishly mentions, "Those systems probably have some pretty dirty data. Determining what's right and what needs correction will need a lot of analysis. Even what's right may need adjustment to fit the new business processes. Some of this change can be automated, but many require a business decision."

Facing the Consequences

The realization sets in that an enterprise-level, soul-searching exercise is in store. The many short-term, timesaving decisions collectively made over the last few decades are coming home to roost. By not addressing cross-functional data needs, most organizations have taken the relatively simple approach to data management for many years. Continuing to look for short-term solutions to an increasingly complex situation will just mean more fingers in the dike.

People need to sit down and really understand how they view their customers differently from other parts of the organization. They will then need to reconcile their view with others to come up with a single enterprise view of the customer. Only then can the technical team take the ball and run with it.

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This painful realization must be globally reached before EAI can be more than an academic exercise. Customer orientation implies changes to business processes. These are then followed by technical changes to support them. The technology only enables implementation of the business plan.

Here again, the success of the EAI effort rests with executive management. It goes beyond realigning incentives to encourage cooperation with the EAI effort: The executive suite must develop and communicate the strategic and long-term vision of the new customer-centric enterprise before the rest of the organization can make the myriad detail decisions that depend on them.

This column has discussed the need for decisive executive direction in tackling the organizational issues on which successful EAI depends. My next column will explore an approach to actually tackling the integration effort "in the trenches."

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Moshe Japha (mjapha@net2phone.com) is manager of data administration at Net2Phone Inc., a leading provider of voice-enhanced Internet communications services to individuals and businesses. He has worked extensively in data and process modeling, data integration, data quality, and business intelligence applications for more than 15 years.