Chalk this one up to 'pie in the sky', technology idealism or whatever you may want to call it but I'd like to use this post to solicit feedback on a potential solution to what we believe is a common problem for many companies. Like many small to mid-sized businesses, Scribe Software has multiple systems we use to manage our business. There is a finance/accounting package, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) package, the online store, our OpenMind support/product/forums community, helpdesk/tech support and our product licensing and registration database. That is no less than six places where some variation of customer, contact and/or partner records reside. Of course, along with each customer or partner record come it's associated quotes, orders, invoices, licenses, etc.
At Scribe we're the lucky ones; at least as lucky as you can be in this scenario. We are developers or our own integration product with a stable (or in our case a barn) of integration experts who have configured our product so that our six data sources stay in synch and share critical information. OK, so I may be exaggerating just a bit but we are good users of our product and, without it, we'd have a mess. That said we still end up in the same conversations you do regarding which system holds the customer master, etc. Also, if you think about it, integrating six systems together creates a lot of cross talk. To be sure, six systems with two-way integrations between each system represents fifteen different two-way combinations for data to travel. I've depicted this in the spaghettis diagram on the right. Surely there is a simpler way, right?
A potential solution to this problem is to create a flexible master data model (a persisted database/integration offering in the middle) to which the systems can be integrated. See the graphic on the left. We'll refer to this (the green dot) as a master data hub and it would contain what we'll refer to as common data; things like customer, order, invoice, etc. By having the six business applications integrated not to each other but instead to the master data hub we not only create a common, master view of the customer but we also simplify integration dramatically when we need to add a seventh system. Adding the seventh system then becomes a matter of making sure that whatever common elements (i.e. customer) it contains are integrated to the master data hub. For example, if the new system allows its users to update customer information then changes to customer information are fed to the hub which then would propagate those changes out to any of the other six systems that also contain customer information. Throw in some auditing capability to have tight control of who is changing what and this could be a nice approach toward managing your data. Of course, this could be especially useful if it comes as a package (complete with the integration components and application connectors and templates) from your favorite integration vendor. Further, an ancillary benefit of doing this would be that the data in your master data hub would be copied from your business systems and, therefore, would be yours to freely to access instead of paying a licensing fee you may encounter when accessing some business applications directly (think external connector fee). Master Data Management + Integration. Interesting?
We'd love your feedback, whether as a comment to this post or an email to products@scribesoft.com, on what you think of this idea. If you think it makes sense we'd be curious as to whether you see this working as an on-premise and/or hosted offering and if you have any suggestions to make the offering work.
