Blog: Jill Dyche

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September 26, 2006

SOA Explained. (Second Time's a Charm)

In which Jill does a mea culpa to her partner, Evan, for not only pinching a good story but bungling its telling. As you'll see from the footnote, payback's a bit... Well, you'll see.

Okay, I botched it.

You see, I’m up in front of a few hundred people at the Teradata Partners conference talking about Customer Data Integration and why it’s a key and growing trend in the quality, integration, and propagation of customer data across the enterprise. Everything’s going swimmingly until I get to the part about Service Oriented Architectures. Then I decide to get cheeky and throw in an analogy that my partner Evan uses to introduce SOA. Except I sort of mangled it.

You see, Service Oriented Architecture changes a lot in terms of the way our systems talk to one another and share data. It has particular consequence for CDI. I said so. Then I tried Evan’s analogy that compares the pre-SOA days to the olden days of Ma Bell. In the periphery I spied Evan off to the side gazing up at the ceiling, and I thought, Uh oh.

Rather than give you my version of Evan’s SOA analogy, I figured I’d let Evan explain it himself. He tells the story this way:

Years ago, when telephone service came into existence, you’d pick up the phone and talk to an operator. You’d ask the operator for a telephone number, for instance, “BR549.”* Back then, telephone numbers weren’t uniform—they included both characters and digits. So the operator would figure out the location of the number and then manually make the connection to another operator in the network who would then contact another operator, down the line. All these operators would be plugging in wires manually to their switchboards to connect the call.

The phone system of old required significant manual intervention to create a connection. Same with application-to-application communications before SOA. SOA simplifies connecting systems, and expands the type of information that can be shared between those systems to support unstructured data and even executable code. It’s the new standard for inter-application communication.

So there it is, this time straight from the horse’s mouth. Thanks to my presentation attendees, whose kind words afterwards washed away my momentary nervosa, and to Evan for setting the SOA record straight.

* For the trivia buffs in the house: “BR549” is the phone number of Junior Sample’s used car lot on the show Hee-Haw. (Happy now, Evan?)

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September 19, 2006

Shhh! It's the Voice of the Customer!

In which Jill holds a glass up to the wall of customer-focused programs, and hears the melodious sound of Customer Data Integration.

Shhh. Listen. If you’re quiet, you can hear them. They’re the conversations of CRM experts discussing data. And you don’t have to put a glass against the wall anymore to hear them.

I love that CRM analysts and advisors are finally leaving behind the well-worn diatribes about “listening to customer” and “the customer experience” and getting to the nitty-gritty. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for listening to the customer—God knows, almost every client we’ve got has a project called “Voice of the Customer”—but that conversation’s been had. Industry analysts and the executives we counsel all “get” that listening to the customer is important. It’s time to get on with it. Fact is, people understand the “what.” What they want now is the “how.”

I wrote a book on CRM a couple years ago that delved in to the “how” and got some flack for the emphasis on the role customer information plays in getting and keeping good customers. Back then, people were focused more on redesigning customer-focused business processes and building customer focused strategies. But now they’re focused on who the customers are, the breadth of their relationships with the company, and how to ensure that the right data about each customer is deployed to the right systems and users. All roads are pointing toward Customer Data Integration (CDI).

And, not to put too fine a point on it, but integrated customer information has to be accurate. This can mean faster business actions, trusted financial forecasts, or customer recognition at the time of interaction. It can make people’s jobs easier, like with the sales person who can access the customer’s most recent interaction—whether it was with him, his colleague, or the company’s Internet—on his Blackberry.

In fact, the Voice of the Customer is frequent and loud. It’s not enough to simply listen. We need to track, record, and monitor what The Voice is saying, reconcile customers’ comments into overarching messages that we can use to improve our businesses, and use the integrated information to enrich our products and services to strategically differentiate ourselves.

So listen, all you “people, process, and technology” folks. That tap, tap, tapping sound is integrated data knocking at the door of our CRM projects. It’s telling us to improve our data accuracy, integrate it operationally, and propagate it consistently. And, like our customer conversations, it’s getting louder.

P.S.: Speaking of CRM, one more thing: If you’d like an evolved blog on CRM, check out Paul Greenberg’s blog. Like Paul, the blog has a sense of humor and it’s straight from the CRM trenches. In other words, Paul can cover the “what” and the “how." Just don't get him started on baseball!

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