Deriving Actionable Customer Insight_Step_One

CIM (Customer Information Management) is the first step when transforming to a Customer-centric Enterprise. The basic steps that make any company reach customer awareness stage are creating rich customer data and Business Intelligence applications to leverage that customer data. Building customer database is the most critical and challenging function of Customer Information Management. ‘Single customer view’ is what most of the enterprises target while implementing any customer solution. Internally, the disparate customer view of different departments increases the gap between the customers and their satisfaction. The disparity only increases with growing mergers and acquisitions. Thus, CIM includes Customer Data Integration (CDI) as a primary function to provide accurate, reliable and timely customer data silos.
The critical CIM approach is preparing the reference architecture and best practices for customer data, integration, impacted business processes, strategic and operational insight or analytics. The application service architecture is also designed to accommodate or leverage web services and SOA in the enterprise. The canonical customer definition plan is the key to single view customer information. The end result of the Customer Information Management exercise is ‘single view’ customer data.

BUSINESS BENEFITS OF ERROR LOGGING FRAMEWORK

ERROR LOGGING FRAMEWORK due to its very architecture brings in numerous business benefits to the table.

1. One single deployment of ELN framework to enforce best practices of exception handling, logging and notification across enterprise.
2. Reduced cost and time of development because designer/development may devote more time to actual business logic rather than plumbing tasks.
3. Over all size of deployed ears (deployable units) reduce due to externalization of exception management tasks.
4. Changes in ELN framework can be done at run time, which reduces planned down time of services.

Infogain As Retail Mobility Partner

Infogain is pleased to announce the deployment of a tailor-made retail mobility system now underway for leading UK shoe retailer.Developed to support our clients’ drive for multi-channel excellence and the opening of a new concept store environment at its flagship London Oxford Street store in March, the customised, fully-integrated solution will harness the power of mobile to acquire, retain and transact with customers on the move - opening up a transformational new dimension in customer engagement.Read more ..

SaaS Execution Models

Taking into account the SaaS-oriented nature of the systems to support Insurance front end processes, several execution models have emerged. These models can be termed as Hybrid Cloud implementations since not all of the functions have truly moved to the Cloud.

Some of the existing models include:

* SaaS in a Virtual Private Cloud
Here both the software and hardware are provisioned by the SaaS vendor in either a virtualized of non-virtualized environment.
* SaaS in a Hosted Environment
Here the SaaS infrastructure in terms of application development and deployment is still private and under the ownership of that particular SaaS vendor but is hosted in either a Virtualized or non-Virtualized Hardware environment (Servers and Storage).


These models are already prevalent with many Insurers outsourcing this function to SaaS vendors. This is increasingly being availed of by Insurance wholesalers in a B2B fashion rather than a B2C mode. Individual customers still go to the respective Insurance company’s website to obtain quotes.Read More..

Cost-effective way to add business value to integration initiatives

Enterprises have multiple applications, scattered data assets spread across different business units, each serving a different purpose. In most cases, applications continue to be vital to the operation of a department, and pivotal to the business as a whole. However, these applications were most often designed and built with a specific need in mind, and not to fit into a broad enterprise IT architecture. In many cases, no such broad architecture exists. This drawback however means that these applications have limited interoperability and inter-application communications capabilities, making it difficult to leverage them to add new business value. To achieve the capabilities such as offering new revenue opportunities, streamlining inefficient or noncompetitive procedures, or reducing costs by exploiting modern technology, you need your applications to work together.

Enterprise-wide Integration solutions have the answer to the problem. They offer a common interface for independently running applications and enable existing applications not only to interoperate, but also define business logic and process rules to organize applications.
However the primary goal of integration must be to make your organization more profitable, competitive and efficient.

Greater agility though an architectural framework

Though the demands on enterprise IT departments increases to accommodate new business opportunities and challenges, it is often difficult to justify funding for infrastructure projects. Meeting those challenges will be faster and easier if IT can build upon a solid foundation of integration. Consider Web services, which provide a powerful platform-neutral interface for extending applications to the Web, to other applications, and to outside partners and customers. Indeed, integration provides a strong and secure platform for both exposing and consuming Web services with legacy applications, and it can also provide an orchestration layer for managing Web services from newer software. Even organizations that have not made the move to Web services can benefit from planning for their eventual adoption.

As IT and corporate management prepare their budgets and investment priorities, an investment in extending existing applications via integration should be carefully considered; the return on investment may be sooner than you think.

The Changing trend :CSS Portals

Customer Self-service Portals were preferred over other content websites to provide consolidated, customized and updated information. The trend moved towards one-click information on weather, cities, movies, music, communities, latest news, stock update and much more with customized and personalized user web space. Users started expecting the possibility of paying bills, checking bank accounts, transferring funds, city information and tracking insurance claims through a secure online platform. Users, no longer, wished to be caught in the slow and lengthy request-processing loop offered by call centers.

SOA EXCEPTION MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES

SOA emphasizes loosely coupled reusable services which must be composable to achieve agility. This makes applications more distributed and essentially the service layer resides over the component/business function provider layer. To comprehend challenges in exception management in SOA world these factors must be considered and issues arising due to multiple technologies among cooperating applications should also be taken into consideration.

Exception Logging:The Exception logs of services/applications consuming other services may contain information in various formats as they may use different database schemas or different log file formats. It is very difficult to query/report against these distributed logs stored in different places. This handicap becomes more prominent with limited access to support staff in production environment.

Exception Notification:Every enterprise notifies concerned service owner, support staff in its unique way and these unique way changes over time period. Off shoring also adds its own complexity to the scenario.

IT teams to develop roadmap to adopt SOA

The SOA implementation engages Business and IT teams to develop roadmap to adopt SOA which can maximize the RoI and minimize the Total Cost of Ownership (ToC). This planning follows Rolling Wave methodology to incorporate changing business and technical requirements. This approach also brings visibility to projects in incremental fashion while considering dynamic environment. The resulting plan includes manpower cost & deployment, software & hardware environment deployment, outsourcing & off-shoring considerations, time lines, dollar costs.