Data integration solutions Functional overview white paper

IBM WebSphere Customer Center features and functionality.

by David Corrigan Product Marketing Manager IBM WebSphere Customer Center

April 2006

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Contents

Introduction

2 6

Introduction WebSphere Customer Center Central Transaction Server

14 Knowledge layer 21 Intelligence layer 24 Integrity layer 26 Performance layer 27 Integration layer 29 Fast Track transaction server and framework 31 Interface layer 34 Configuration and customization toolkits and frameworks 35 Composite transaction framework 41 User interfaces 42 Conclusion 43 For more information

Leading organizations and industry analysts have identified that the critical element in a customer-centric business strategy is acquiring a single version of the customer truth that is accessible by all systems and channels. This category of solutions is commonly referred to as customer data integration (CDI). CDI solutions manage customer operational transactions and maintain a single operational customer view, which is the system of record for customer data. CDI solutions are integrated with existing operational systems through business services (or Web services); this enables those applications to benefit from sharing complete customer data and business processes with each other, to improve the effectiveness of their application (for example, by providing better service to high-value customers or recognizing customer sales opportunities). Because of their high level of integration, CDI solutions are important strategic investments that organizations must evaluate thoroughly in order to receive the best possible return on investment (ROI). The most effective and most common approach to CDI is to implement a neutral, service-oriented customer component that persists the authoritative customer record in a database. This approach has advantages over both the applicationcentric master approach and a virtual approach in a few key areas.

Service oriented architecture (SOA): A CDI solution must contain business services that are designed for consumption by business applications and integration technologies. Most often, CDI services are invisible to the user and must be able to be customized, extended and consolidated into composite business processes.

Neutrality: A CDI solution must be business-process neutral. It is designed to be a common infrastructure component that is accessed by multiple business applications; therefore, it cannot have business processes that are specific to any one application. This is a common reason that organizations do not select CDI solutions offered by customer

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relationship management (CRM) vendors. In reality, those CRM vendors are offering a CRM database with limited application programming interfaces (APIs) and business function that is designed from the point of view of a CRM system user (for example, a callcenter representative). The most-effective CDI solutions are process neutral and manage business processes that are common to multiple business applications.

Performance and scalability: CDI solutions are placed at the center of organizations operational transactions and can represent a single point of failure for customer data. Obviously, these solutions need to perform and scale to meet the requirements of large organizations, which often exceed hundreds of thousands of transactions per hour and subsecond response times.

Extensibility: CDI solutions must be extensible to allow for customization and extension without changing the core product. This allows organizations to benefit from the ongoing product road map of the CDI solution, while customizing it to meet their specific needs. It is important that CDI solutions be able to support extensions and customizations being built in easy-to-use and widely available tools (for example, standard Java development tools). CDI solutions should not have proprietary tooling that is difficult to use and more costly to train resources on or hire consultants for, as this will increase the total cost of ownership (TCO) to the organization.

Flexibility: CDI solutions must be able to incorporate data from other sources and to integrate with those sources for continuous customer-data processing. For example, CDI solutions should integrate with data warehouse solutions to operationalize customer insight and to provide updates to the data warehouse environment in order to marry the operational and offline single customer views.

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In addition to the points mentioned, there are several functional requirements that represent the best practices for CDI:

Knowledge (customer database): A primary requirement is that the CDI solution should persist customer data to maintain the authoritative customer data record for customer demographic and product information, as well as new information that does not reside in existing operational systems, such as customer relationships, privacy preferences and cross-channel interactions, among many others.

Action (business services and logic): The action component is the means of accessing and updating the customer data held within the database. The action component is a set of business services for updating and accessing customer data. It contains business logic for updating and maintaining all customer data held within the customer database. It also contains logic for composite business services that represent business processes (for example, adding a customer).

Intelligence (business rules): The intelligence layer is a set of internal components that are accessed by the action layer services. Intelligence components are a set of business rules that make action services smart and enable the customer hub to be an active, intelligent operational system. Intelligence services are business rules for action-layer processes that govern data access and event detection and management.

Integrity (data quality management): The integrity component is a set of internal services that are accessed by action-layer services. Integrity services maintain the single version of the customer truth and include party-matching, data-stewardship and data-validation services.

Performance: Performance components are designed to allow for performance tuning and reporting. These components allow clients to manage cached data for in-memory processing and to design data-relevancy indicator attributes and denormalization options through dynamic attributes to minimize unnecessary database access and improve performance.

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Integration: Integration interfaces are packaged within the core application. All business services within the action layer must contain integration hooks to allow clients to plug in custom logic or applications, or both, within the context of a CDI transaction. In addition, published interfaces for functions and common components (intelligence and integrity components, for example) allow clients to plug other vendor tools into published interfaces.

Search-and-inquiry framework and composite-transaction framework: A packaged CDI application must offer significant functionality (services) out of the box; however, it must also allow clients to customize the application and to build customized services as required. The search-and-inquiry framework enables you to build custom search-and-inquiry services within the IBM WebSphere Customer Center architecture, thereby allowing you to take advantage of WebSphere Customer Center functions such as rules of visibility and data validation, among others. The composite-transaction framework allows you to build composite transactions for their specific requirements.

Interface (service integration with other applications): CDI solutions can be integrated with a variety of operational and nonoperational systems and must contain a variety of methods for interfacing with those applications. The interface layer must support multiple methods of surfacing, or accessing, action layer services (that is, starting a transaction). CDI solutions must support real-time and batch interfaces that access the same business services (and business logic).

WebSphere Customer Center is the leading CDI solution and has been recognized by industry analysts such as Gartner Group1 as the leader in this software category. Part of the reason WebSphere Customer Center holds an industry leadership position is the broad functionality included within the application. This paper will provide details on its unique functionality and will demonstrate why WebSphere Customer Center is the recognized leader in CDI.

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WebSphere Customer Center central transaction server Action layer operational business services

The action layer contains operational business services of WebSphere Customer Center. In the current product release, there are over 500 business services. Business services represent the functionality of the product, and they are meant to be integrated with business applications to provide full operational customer-data management capabilities. The services described in the following sections are both large-grain (significant-function) services and finegrain (small-function) services. An example of a large-grain service is adding a party record; an example of a fine-grain service is updating a partys telephone number. Large-grain services typically contain several fine-grain services. The central concept of WebSphere Customer Center is a party; a party is defined as legal entity that is either a person or an organization (which can be a legal organization or a group of parties). WebSphere Customer Center contains business services that are party-centric, as well as business services that retrieve party data by external party reference keys (other system party IDs). WebSphere Customer Center supports other important concept subject areas, meaning that a significant number of important concept-centric services are offered. Accounts and agreements are the most significant important concept subject area, and WebSphere Customer Center contains dozens of services that are account-centric. These account-centric services allow clients to interact with the application using account data (for example, detailed account data such as balances, account systems keys, and so on). This is extremely important to clients who are migrating from a product-centric to a client-centric strategy, because it allows them to integrate existing account-centric processes while maintaining and providing more accurate and complete customer data. Other important concept subject areas include locations, groups, hierarchies and party roles.

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The WebSphere Customer Center business services are grouped into subject areas as shown in Figure 1.
Action layer - Operational business transactions

Party demographic services Party Person demographic Organization demographic Party names Line of business Party values Party search Delete party Delete party history Events and customer insight services

Roles

Party relationship services

Party macro roles Contract party roles Rebate or claim party roles Grouping party roles Hierarchy party roles Relationship party roles

Party relationships Party grouping Hierarchy management Role relationships Entity grouping

Customer service and sales services Interaction history Campaigns Privacy Customer preferences Party values (value profile) Notes or alerts Tasks

Location services Address Contact method Household Location group Role location Address standardization Address demographics

Party events Events Customer value profile

Data stewardship Duplicate suspect management Collapse parties Split parties Collapse with rules Source system data Data decay metadata Suspect search Create suspects

Party financial-profile services

Party-identification directory services

Party macro roles Contract party roles Rebate or claim party roles Grouping party roles

Party identification registration Party equivalency ID System key ID Acxiom Abilitec key retrieval

Agreement and product services Account Account component Party account role Account location Billing Rebate or refund Account note or alert Account search Account relationships Product Holding

History or audit

Party history audit trail Account history audit trail Transaction audit log Delete party history

Figure 1. IBM WebSphere Customer Center subject area grouping

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Core party services

WebSphere Customer Center contains business services for maintaining both person and organization demographic information. Multiple names for a party are maintained with the party name services. Party values services maintain multiple value profiles for various categories of party data (for example, multiple risk scores within one profile, marketing insight scores in a second profile). Party search services allow clients to search for party records using multiple search criteria, including party names, addresses, contact methods and identifiers. Delete party services will delete a party record after it has been determined that the record can be deleted (for example, if the party does not have an active role on an account). Addition services delete history or audit records for the party. Party history audit services retrieve historical information on the party record from the WebSphere Customer Center history database.
Roles

WebSphere Customer Center contains multiple services for managing the role that a party plays within the organization. Party macro-role services manage the partys overall, or macro, role within the organization; examples include the role of customer, prospect, agent and so on. Party macro-roles can be related to other party-centric objects through granular party macro role services, that is, to relate party-centric data to the partys role (in the role of customer, the partys home address applies and so on). A party can play one or many roles. Account party role services manage the multiple roles that a party can play on one or more accounts. Rebate or claim party-role services maintain role information that a party plays on one or more rebates or claims. Grouping party-role services maintain information on the role that a party plays within a party group (for example, the role head of household). Hierarchy party-role services maintain role information for roles that a party plays within a hierarchy, represented

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by the party being a node in the hierarchy. Relationship party-role services manage party roles for parties involved in a party-to-party relationship. For example, within an employer-to-employee relationship, person party X plays the role of officer within signatory authority.
Party relationship services

WebSphere Customer Center contains business services for maintaining partyto-party relationships (for example, business partners, spouses). Party-to-party relationships can exist between two parties independently (for example, party A and B are spouses) or within the context of the role that both parties play on an account (for example, party A is the executor of the will for party B); role relationships are maintained by contract party-role relationship services. Multilevel relationships are managed by hierarchical relationships services (organization subsidiaries and so on). Hierarchy services maintain ultimate and local parent data for the hierarchy, hierarchy node relationship details (parent-child relationships between two nodes in the hierarchy), and the category and type of the hierarchy. Relationships among multiple parties (either persons or organizations) are maintained with partygrouping business services. These services maintain the relationships between one or more parties and the group, maintain definable values for a group, and can retrieve data objects for the group that are related to a party (for example, the primary address for a group). Additional services manage the forming and reforming of groups based on customizable logic (for example, whether a party can belong to more than one group when playing a specific role and so on). Line-of-business (LOB) relationship services maintain the partys relationship to one or more LOB units within the organization (for example, retail, commercial and so on).

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Location services

WebSphere Customer Center contains business services for maintaining data on location addresses and multiple contact methods and relating them to a party. Household services identify parties that belong to the same address. Address standardization services are generalized interfaces to address standardization components and applications (for example, address standardization vendors such as WebSphere Quality Stage or Trillium ). Address demographics services allow clients to track user-defined values for addresses and to store free-form text notes on addresses. Role location services relate one or more party addresses to a role that the party plays on an account, for example, the partys home address is the billing address for its account.
Party event and customer insight services

WebSphere Customer Center contains services for accessing party events (both system-generated and user-defined). It also contains services for adding user-defined events (for example, the event is discovered during a telephone interaction and is recorded with the customer-event profile). In addition, WebSphere Customer Center maintains marketing insight using the party value-profile services.
Customer service and sales services

WebSphere Customer Center contains comprehensive business services for managing customer service and sales information that is required for multichannel integration. Interaction history services maintain data on all inbound and outbound interactions regarding a customer. Campaign services store summary-level campaign information and share it with all channels to improve marketing campaign response rates. Privacy services maintain default and customer-stated privacy preferences for data management and solicitation. Preference services manage complex customer-service preferences

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(for example, contact preferences for specific contact methods and specific products). Party value-profile services maintain customer value and service indicators (for example, customer profitability scores). Party notes or alerts services maintain categorized party notes that are useful when servicing across multiple channels.
Agreement and product services

Account or contract services maintain detailed information for an account or contract, where a contract is defined as a legal agreement between one or more parties and the company. This business service adds account details, such as the name and type of account, currency values, LOB and language details. It also adds or creates parties associated with the account or contract, as well as additional data on the party (names, addresses, contact methods and so on). This composite business service can be consumed by multiple channel applications and back-office systems for new-business processing functionality. WebSphere Customer Center also contains update and inquiry business services for contracts and accounts. Account or contract component services maintain account and contract components associated with an account or contract. Party account role services manage the role or roles that a party plays with respect to an account or contract. Account or contract location services maintain location to account and contract relationships, as well as the purpose of the location (address) for an account (for example, a billing address). Billing services maintain summary-level billing information for an account or contract. Account notes or alert services maintain user-entered (free-form text) notes, as well as categories and types, for an account or contract. Account search services facilitate searching for accounts using account or party data, or both. Account relationship services relate two accounts to each other and manage the details of the relationship between the accounts (for example, one account provides funds for another and so on). Account history audit services

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are used to inquire on historical account, contract and associated information contained in the history database of WebSphere Customer Center. Holding services maintain information on a partys holdings (assets, liabilities, physical objects) and relate them to contracts and accounts. Claim or refund services manage claim and refund information for a particular account. Product services manage summary-level product information and product relationship information and link products to account and contract information.
Data stewardship services

WebSphere Customer Center contains services for duplicate suspect management, including services for creating suspects (performing party matching for a specified target party). Mark and unmark suspect services allow for duplicate suspects to be identified or unidentified manually. This also includes functions to detect when to perform duplicate suspect matching, for example when critical data is updated or when a new party is added. Collapse party services manage the collapse of two parties into a surviving party record. All information related to the two customer records can be blended into the new customer record (for example, the address is correct on customer suspect record number 1, but the first name is correct on customer suspect record number 2). The product provides default data survivorship rules (which can be customized) to select which data survives on the new party record, which is provided within the collapse party with rules service. The split party service splits a single party into two party records. Suspect search services facilitate searching for party suspect records by a variety of criteria, including match category levels, last name of one of the suspects or the date that the suspect relationship was created, among others. WebSphere Customer Center manages metadata on party data that might be used to inform data stewardship processes, such as default survivorship rules. Source system services manage metadata on the source of data maintained in

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WebSphere Customer Center (for example, the source of the partys address was the billing system). Data-decay services maintain metadata on the accuracy of data held within WebSphere Customer Center. These services manage the last verification date (that is, the last time that the data was verified with the party) and the last successful use date (that is, the last time that the data was used and it was found to be accurate, for example, using an address for mailing and not receiving a return mail notice). Source system and data-decay metadata can be managed for any object or attribute, or both, within WebSphere Customer Center and is an optional object on existing core party services for names, locations, privacy preferences and identifiers.
Party financial profile services

WebSphere Customer Center maintains a financial profile for a party. Income source services manage party income source information such as income amount, source and details, among others. Party financial account services maintain financial account (for example, bank account, charge card) information. Party payroll deduction information services maintain data for payroll deduction purposes. All payment account data can be related back to accounts and bills.
Party identification services

WebSphere Customer Center creates a unique Customer ID for each customer record. This process is externalized, allowing WebSphere Customer Center to incorporate a companys existing customer ID generation tools into the WebSphere Customer Center add party business service. Clients can maintain a unique customer ID that is linked to the customers accounts. Party identification or registration services maintain external partyidentification data such as drivers license data, among others, and relevant information (issue location for the identification and so on).

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WebSphere Customer Center maintains cross-reference keys to other systems through party equivalency services and system-key ID services that maintain equivalent IDs for parties and accounts in other applications. WebSphere Customer Center also contains services for retrieving external reference IDs, which can be used to integrate with vendor-data service providers for customer identification (for example, Acxiom Abilitec service).
History and audit services

WebSphere Customer Center contains services for retrieving historical audit data for objects. If a date or a date range is passed within an inquiry transaction for parties or accounts, data is retrieved from the history database. Transaction audit-information log services allow for inquiry on transaction log data. Delete party-history services removes history records for a party from the history database.
Knowledge layer

WebSphere Customer Center has a knowledge layer that maintains operational and historic customer information. Access to the knowledge layer occurs through action services. See Figure 2 for the objects within WebSphere Customer Center.
Party

The central object within WebSphere Customer Center is a party. A party is defined as a legal entity. Parties are subtyped into organizations or persons. WebSphere Customer Center can manage multiple types of parties (customers, prospects and so on). Other logical data-model subject areas are related to and managed through the party component (for example, addresses are added to the database only when they are related to a party).

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Knowledge Layer - What is a CDI Hub?

Location
Demographics
Relationships

Interaction

Privacy

Party

Roles

Person

Organization

Agreement and product

Financial profile

Events and insight

Identification
Figure 2. WebSphere Customer Center objects

Data stewardship

Roles

Roles are an important concept within WebSphere Customer Center. A party can play one or more macro roles, which are defined as roles that the party is playing with respect to the company (for example, the role of customer or prospect). Macro roles can be related to one or more party-centric objects (for example, in the role of customer, the party has a specific address). Parties also play roles

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with respect to other objects that group multiple parties. For example, a party can play one or many roles in an account (owner, user and so on). Party roles are also managed for groups (for example, member, head of household), hierarchies, party-to-party relationships, and claims or rebates.
Location

WebSphere Customer Center maintains location data that is related to a party. It also manages multiple address types and the partys usage of the unique address, such as seasonal addresses, mailing addresses and legal mailing address, among others. WebSphere Customer Center manages a many-to-many relationship between an address and a customer. WebSphere Customer Center stores multiple contact methods for customers, such as telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, mailing addresses and fax numbers, among others. A customer can have multiple contact methods for each contact method type (for example, multiple phone numbers, business number, residential number, cellular number and so on). Demographic details on locations, including values and notes, can be maintained.
Demographics

WebSphere Customer Center stores and manages information specific to people and organizational parties. WebSphere Customer Center manages information specific to a person, such as date of birth, country of citizenship, age and first, middle and last name, among many other attributes. WebSphere Customer Center also manages information specific to an organization, such as the its type, legal name and industry. WebSphere Customer Center maintains user-defined miscellaneous values (characters, numeric and so on) for the party record. Using this function, organizations can modify specific party data to be stored within the core product in a Web user-interface, code-table-driven environment.

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Relationships

WebSphere Customer Center manages the relationship between all entities, such as a customer, addresses, products, organizations, contact methods, suspects, identifications, households, groups, systems, and servicing and sales agents. WebSphere Customer Center maintains direct party-to-party relationships. A single party can have multiple direct relationships to numerous other parties they can be involved in a spousal relationship with another party, or an employment relationship with an organization party. Parties can also be indirectly related to one another through their relationship (the roles they play) on an account. Account role relationships are maintained within the context of the role that two parties play on an account; for example, a trustee relationship would be managed as an account role relationship. WebSphere Customer Center contains prebuilt relationship types and also allows organizations to easily customize types to their specific needs. Parties can be grouped together by user-defined criteria. Groups can include households, affinity groups, segmentation and risk-score groupings, among others. Groups can also be managed as parties (organizations), depending on the nature of the group and the amount of data and functionality required for that group. Party hierarchy relationships can be created and maintained to manage complex party hierarchies (for example, organizational hierarchies). The data model supports management of a hierarchy object, a relationship to one ultimate parent entity, the relationship between nodes in the hierarchy, and one

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or more local parent designations. The hierarchy subject area can be used to manage other types of hierarchies as well (for example, an account hierarchy). WebSphere Customer Center maintains LOB relationships between a party and a line of business. A party can be related to one or more lines of business.
Financial profile

WebSphere Customer Center stores information on a partys payment accounts. Payment accounts include bank accounts, charge cards and payroll deductions. This information can be required and used during the payment process for the accounts owned by the customer. Payment source is related to account through the billing object. WebSphere Customer Center stores income source information for a party and relates that to its agreements and contracts.
Multichannel integration

WebSphere Customer Center stores and manages the partys complete interaction history across all channels in the organization Web, wireless, call center, interactive voice response (IVR) and so on. Other front-office CRM systems (like call center applications) can populate WebSphere Customer Center with interaction history information using action services. By providing a central source of interaction information for the customer, organizations can ensure more-consistent service delivery across their existing communications channels. WebSphere Cusomer Center manages summary-level data for an interaction ie. the type of interaction and the party that the interaction is regarding. In addition, event notifications and other business processes can be triggered by interactions, which allow enterprise-level customer business processes to be initiated and accessed by all front-office systems.

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WebSphere Customer Center maintains privacy information for a party. The data model manages both default and customer-stated privacy preferences. Relationships can be established between default privacy preferences to denote which default preferences take precedence over other preferences. The partys specific preferences are also stored and override the default preference if they are present. Privacy preferences contain actions (for example, do not call, do not share data). Privacy preferences can be related to other objects such as locations (addresses and contact methods), accounts and parties. Customer service or contact preferences are also maintained within the same subject area. WebSphere Customer Center manages alerts and notes for other objects, such as parties, accounts and addresses. Notes can be used to store important information on specific entities and to make this information available to all channels across the organization. WebSphere Customer Center maintains summary-level campaign information for the party. Campaigns can be related to parties, products or groups of parties. Key customer-service indicators (such as profitability and so on) are maintained in the party values area.
Identification

WebSphere Customer Center maintains identification and registration for customers, such as drivers license numbers and credit card numbers. This identifier object maintains data on the issue date and location, reference ID, description and effective dates for the identifier. Each customer record has a system-generated unique customer identifier. WebSphere Customer Center maintains a customer data index and maintains cross-references to other sources of customer information through the party equivalency area. External agreement and product information is linked through the system identifier area. WebSphere Customer Center contains business services to retrieve party and account data based on external system keys.

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Agreement and product

WebSphere Customer Center maintains agreements and contracts and relates them to multiple parties; parties can play one or many roles on an agreement (primary account holder, for example). Agreements and contracts have user-defined values (account balances, for example). Agreements can have multiple components and can be related to one another. WebSphere Customer Center maintains the partys role and role identification (for example, a line-of-business identifier) that relates a party identifier and registration to an identification method for an agreement or contract. WebSphere Customer Center maintains multiple definable party roles for an agreement. Agreements or contracts are related to locations through location role and location role purpose, which maintain the relationship between a location (for example, an address) and an agreement, and the usage of the location for the agreement (for example, billing address). Agreement and contract notes are maintained to store specific user-entered notes for the agreement. WebSphere Customer Center maintains summary-level billing information that stores bills and bill information related to the agreement or contract. Rebates or claims services store summary-level claim or rebate information for a party and a covered item and relate it to an agreement or contract. WebSphere Customer Center maintains product information on products related to the customer, such as the product name, the product type and details, among others. It also supports product hierarchy and relationships.
Events

WebSphere Customer Center maintains event data and relates it to a party. Party events can be either system-generated or user-defined. Event subjects and detailed event data are maintained in this subject area. WebSphere Customer Center maintains customer insight data in the party value-profile area; this is often the place where marketing insight values are stored and is a logical integration point with the data warehouse and analytics environment.

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Data stewardship

WebSphere Customer Center maintains party-party relationships for party match suspect relationships. This area stores party match information (match scores, nonmatch relevancy scores, reason types and so on). WebSphere Customer Center also maintains data on collapsed and split parties through the party link area. Metadata on original source system data is maintained using default source values. This area maintains source system data for other data held within WebSphere Customer Center (for example, a privacy preference). It also holds the original source value of a data item that was added using WebSphere Customer Center action services and was altered from its original state for data validation or standardization purposes, or both. The source object also maintains data-decay information on operational customer data the last date that a data attribute was verified with a party, and the last date that a data attribute was successfully used.
Intelligence layer

The intelligence layer comprises common components that are accessed by the business services within the action layer. These components are designed to add intelligence to action layer services to control data access and entitlements, add pre- and postimplementation business logic to action layer services, and to detect and manage customer events (see Figure 3).
Event management

WebSphere Customer Center has event management functions that detect transactional (customer data is accessed, updated or added) or nontransactional (for example, date-driven) events. Event rule definitions are created using the business rules engine. The event notification framework within WebSphere Customer Center allows clients to define business rules that monitor data changes that require event notifications. Specific event-notification messages content and topic information

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Intelligence layer

!
Event manager
Event rule definition Event detection Event notification Critical data management

Transactional business rules

Business rules engine Rule management Rule definition Plain language object library

Data security
Transaction security Rules of visibility Data entitlements
Figure 3. Intelligence layer overview

can be defined. The notification message is sent as an XML message through the messaging adapter after the customer data is changed. Critical data management services ensure that information cannot be changed without correct processing and allow WebSphere Customer Center to manage data changes across lines of business that can have an impact on other lines of business.
Transactional business rules

The external rules component is used to manage business rules for action services. External rules can be defined in the default business rules engine included with WebSphere Customer Center or another rules engine, or written as Java classes. Each action component service has pre- and postimplementation stubs that allow business

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rules to be inserted into each action service. Unlike closed and proprietary systems, WebSphere Customer Center has an externalized business rules engine that allows organizations to customize processes quickly and easily, while maintaining a blackbox architecture and preserving the core product for future upgrades.
Data security

Transaction security WebSphere Customer Center manages transaction-level security. Users and user groups are given security access to specific action component transactions, and for users without appropriate access rights for a particular transaction, the transaction fails and an error message is sent to the requesting user. The WebSphere Customer Center transaction security, working with rules of visibility and data entitlements, allows customer data privacy and security to be managed within the customer hub and enforced across all systems. Rules of visibility and data entitlements WebSphere Customer Center manages rules of visibility and data entitlements for all customer knowledge entities and attributes. Data attributes can be grouped together and users and user groups are given access rights to data. Rules of visibility filter data from WebSphere Customer Center transaction responses. For example, a user not entitled to see credit card numbers has this data attribute filtered from a Get Party identification transaction. Data entitlements manage the users entitlements with respect to data updates on attributes. Rules of visibility and data entitlements allow WebSphere Customer Center to manage privacy for customer information, governing accessibility of specific customer data attributes.

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Integrity layer

The integrity services within WebSphere Customer Center are designed to manage data quality and to maintain a single version of the customer truth (see Figure 4). Integrity Layer

Duplicate suspect processing Party-matching engine Evergreening application

=

Data validation engine

Transaction logging

?
Error messaging

a A
Data standardization Trillium adapter

Suspect processing action rules External references ID Acxiom adapter

Figure 4. Integrity layer overview

Duplicate suspect processing

WebSphere Customer Center enables an organization to maintain a single version of the truth for the customer by ensuring that duplicate party records are not entered. Action services such as adding a new party or updating a partys address invoke the duplicate suspect process, which performs a party search and provides candidate parties to the party matching engine. The party matching engine uses business rules to compare a target party to a number of candidate match parties. The rules engine determines the matching and nonmatching attributes and the party-matching algorithm determines a match and nonmatch score. Suspect action rules determine what action should be taken when specific categories of suspects are identified (for example, exact match found, update the existing party, partial match found then persist the second party and create a suspect relationship, return the list of suspects

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in a response message to the requesting application for right time duplicate suspect processing and so on). A notification message is sent when duplicate suspects have been detected and is sent using the event notification services within WebSphere Customer Center to a message queue. The Evergreening application manages batch party processing, including identifying suspects and collapsing parties; it runs party actions at user-defined time intervals (for example, during off-peak hours). The retrieve external identifier service and Acxiom Adapter retrieves Acxiom Abilitec keys. It is also a set of business rules that adjust the core party-matching engine scores based on the presence of an Abilitec key.
Data validation

WebSphere Customer Center can enforce data validation rules to all incoming transactions and data submitted from various applications. WebSphere Customer Center supports conditional external data validation, meaning that data validation rules can be varied by conditions (for example, based on a partys LOB relationship). This ensures that all data entering the authoritative customer information record is held to the same enterprise standard for data validation.
Transaction audit information log

WebSphere Customer Center maintains a full history of all changes performed on the customer record, which establishes an audit trail of all changes to customer information across the enterprise. WebSphere Customer Center records transaction history for the customer data the specific transaction (business logic) used to change the customer data. Organizations can use that audit trail to track specific customer information changes and which users and systems made those changes for audit trail purposes.

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Error messaging

WebSphere Customer Center has error-messaging functionality that returns error messages when WebSphere Customer Center transactions fail. This functionality can be integrated with enterprise monitoring systems for systems maintenance.
Performance layer

The performance layer components are a collection of configuration options, functional components and logging tools that improve product performance (see Figure 5). Performance Layer

Caching Static data held in memory

Performance manager Performance logging integration with monitoring applications

ABC D

Dynamic attributes Customizable denormalization

Summary data relevancy indicators Subject area or object indicators on core tables

Figure 5. Performance layer overview

Performance manager

WebSphere Customer Center allows organizations to configure performance measurement functionality that monitors and records transactions and subtransactions (internal functions) that, in turn, make up a business service and the time associated with each of these actions. This allows users to diagnose components of transactions and optimize performance accordingly. All performance data is logged in an application response measurement (ARM) 3.0 standard format, allowing for integration with performance monitoring tools that conform to that standard.

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Caching

WebSphere Customer Center caches all static data and rules in memory to improve application performance. Cached data includes code table values, business rules, and data validation rules, among others. The caching component is responsible for managing cached data across all application instances.
Dynamic attributes

The WebSphere Customer Center extension framework and wizard component supports the creation of attributes within core product tables. This enables clients to denormalize data attributes as required for their implementations (for example, store a denormalized privacy preference on the account record and so on).
Summary data-relevancy indicators

WebSphere Customer Center contains summary data-relevancy indicators on core product tables. The indicators are designed to identify if relevant data exists in various related objects or subject areas, in order to avoid unnecessary database access for irrelevant information. The determination of relevancy is externalized into a configuration parameter (property file or business rule); for example, one company can determine that a relevant client interaction must be less than two weeks old, and another less than one year old, depending on the frequency of customer interactions with its business.
Integration layer

WebSphere Customer Center contains a number of integration points, or interfaces, within the core application (see Figure 6). This allows clients to integrate vendor applications within transactional business services.

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Integration Layer

a a
Interfaces Name standardization Address standardization Party matching External rules External reference ID User or user group definition Performance monitoring Event management Data validation
Adapters Name standardization - Trillium Address standardization - Trillium Party matching - IBM WebSphere party matching engine External rules - iLog jRules, Java classes External reference ID - Acxiom User or user group definition: LDAP 2.0 Performance monitoring: ARM 3.0 Event management - IBM WebSphere event manager IBM WebSphere data validation engine
Business service integration points Pre- and post-exit points on all business services

Figure 6. Interfaces

Interfaces

WebSphere Customer Center contains a number of interfaces that allow clients to plug into vendor party components, including:

Name standardization an interface that passes a party name and accepts a standardized version of that name for storage in the person name table. WebSphere Customer Center contains an adapter to Trillium. Clients can build adapters to other tools as required.

Address standardization an interface that passes an address and accepts a standardized version of that address to override the original input value. WebSphere Customer Center contains an adapter to Trillium. Clients can build adapters to other tools as required.

Party matching an interface that passes a list of candidate parties and expects to receive a list of those parties with match-level indicators (categories). WebSphere Customer Center is integrated with the WebSphere Customer Center matching engine.

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External rules an interface that manages various external rule files. WebSphere Customer Center contains an interface and a runtime version of iLOG jRules. External reference ID an interface that retrieves relevant party data from WebSphere Customer Center and passes it to a party ID interface, and then stores the return value (ID) in the party identifier object. WebSphere Customer Center contains an interface to Acxiom.

User or user group definition an interface for retrieving user and user group definitions for use within WebSphere Customer Center. WebSphere Customer Center contains a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) 2.0 standard adapter.

Performance monitoring an interface that logs performance data to a standardized format. WebSphere Customer Center contains an ARM 3.0 interface. Event management an event interface that calls an event engine to determine whether an event has occurred. WebSphere Customer Center is integrated with the WebSphere Customer Center event manager application.

Data validation an interface that manages the location of data-validation rule files. WebSphere Customer Center contains an interface to the WebSphere Customer Center data validation engine.

Fast Track transaction server and framework The WebSphere Customer Center Fast Track transaction server (FTS) is designed to support high-speed inquiry transactions. It is designed as a Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) component that will run outside the J2EE application server.

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Fast Track transactions are designed to support high-speed inquiry, particularly for large-volume, mainframe-based batch jobs. The FTS uses the interface components described before including the common business oriented language (COBOL) adapter, IBM CICS and COBOL Call interfaces, and the COBOL Copybook parser. Fast Track transactions are designed for performance and therefore support fewer configuration options than the central transaction server.

FAST TRACK - Transaction Server

Interface layer Productized transactions Get party Client-defined transactions Inquiry 1 Inquiry 2 Inquiry 3 IBM WebSphere Customer Center database

Exec CICS link interface

JMS interface

COBOL adapter

Fast Track transaction framework

COBOL call interface

Infrastructure platforms COBOL Copybook parser and constructor COBOL monitor COBOL z/OS JCL

Figure 7. WebSphere Customer Center Fast Track transaction server overview

The Fast Track server contains a framework for designing custom transactions. Clients can define specific transactions to support their exact inquiry requirements, therefore optimizing performance to meet their processing requirements.

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The Fast Track transaction server runs on a mainframe IBM z/OS infrastructure and can be deployed within the z or OS job control language (JCL) or a CICS transaction monitor. Interface layer WebSphere Customer Center supports multiple real-time and batch interfaces and multiple file formats for incoming transaction request messages. Regardless of the requesting interface and message format, the message is parsed to WebSphere Customer Center Java objects and all run through the same business services (business logic).

Interface Layer
Adapters or interfaces
XML

File formats

IBM WebSphere central transaction server

XML interface

Messaging adapter IBM Composite WebSphere transaction Customer framework Center XML XML

Request response

Web services

IBM WebSphere Business Integration

Message queue
Figure 8. Interface layer overview

Real time Batch

IBM WebSphere Fast Track transaction server

Java object

Messaging adapter

COBOL Copybook

Flat file

COBOL adapter

CICS interface Customer parser Custom constructor

Batch transaction processor

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Notification framework

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Real-time interfaces WebSphere Customer Center supports the following real-time interfaces:

XML interface WebSphere Customer Center contains an XML interface for each of the more than 500 action services that support XML messages through Remote Method Invocation (RMI).

Web services adapter WebSphere Customer Center contains a Web services adapter that supports Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) transactions, and provides access to all action layer services.

Messaging adapter WebSphere Customer Center has a messaging adapter and listener that reads transactions from a Java Message Service (JMS)-enabled queue and sends those transactions into the WebSphere Customer Center action services. Messages can be put back onto a message queue for response transactions.

Java object interface WebSphere Customer Center contains a Java object interface to its business objects (action services). This interface allows for a direct integration with other applications to incorporate WebSphere Customer Center customer management services within those applications processes and functions.

IBM WebSphere Business Integration Adapter WebSphere Customer Center contains an interface to IBM WebSphere Business Integration. The interface contains a generic adapter for mapping to WebSphere Business Integration, as well as specific business services (action layer services) that are preconfigured to WebSphere Business Integration.

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COBOL adapter and CICS interface WebSphere Customer Center contains a COBOL adapter that accepts COBOL calls or CICS transactions and maps them to WebSphere Customer Center services. The COBOL adapter works in conjunction with the COBOL Copybook parser component to parse incoming copybook formats to the WebSphere Customer Center object format.

Event Manager (Evergreen application ) WebSphere Customer Center Event Manager contains an interface (services) to determine when to take particular actions for a specified party (for example, create suspect relationships for party A).

The only CDI vendor approach that meets the above criteria is the service-oriented CDI application approach. Both the application-suite approach and the tool or asset approach require significant customization work to be done by the customer, which dramatically raises the TCO of either of those client solutions. Therefore, from the point of view of integrating within a SOA, only the service-oriented CDI hub application will offer the lowest TCO. Batch interfaces The WebSphere Customer Center batch transaction processor framework manages batch-transaction requests. The batch-transaction processor is a client application that processes batch files. It contains reader or writer functions to read batch files and write to output files. The flat-file input is then parsed using the request framework parser constructor component. The batch transaction processor controls the pace of sending WebSphere Customer Center transactions to the core product (action layer services) for processing.

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Real-time interfaces WebSphere Customer Center supports the ability to accept user-defined input and to generate user-defined output using customized parser and constructor components. The parser can accept a single request and can construct multiple transactions. WebSphere Customer Center supports the following file formats:

XML WebSphere Customer Center contains an XML parser and constructor for all action-layer business services. Composite XML WebSphere Customer Center supports parsing composite transaction XML (the XML composite transaction framework that includes specific functions such as attribute substitution, backwards reference and so on).

COBOL Copybook WebSphere Customer Center contains a parser for COBOL Copybook messages and provides a default copybook representation of select WebSphere Customer Center services.

Flat file WebSphere Customer Center contains a parser for flat files and provides a sample flat-file parser for select WebSphere Customer Center services.

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Figure 9. Configuration and customization toolkits and frameworks

Configuration and customization toolkits and frameworks WebSphere Customer Center contains functionality to manage product customization, additions and extensions (see Figure 9). Composite transaction framework

The composite transaction framework allows clients to compose new services from existing WebSphere Customer Center services, or custom services and

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logic, or both. Composite transactions can be implemented in multiple areas of the product, including:

XML composite transaction framework WebSphere Customer Center contains a framework for building composite transactions within XML messages. Composite XML messages are supported by the request framework parser, which manages the individual transactions stemming from one composite XML message. XML composite transactions are supported as a single unit of work. Supported functions include: Global attribute substitution: This is the ability to define global attribute values that will get substituted during run time. Backward references: This is the ability to refer to attribute values, which come back in response objects and substitute the values into subsequent request objects during run time. This feature supports Boolean operations. Conditional logic: Can be used to determine the appropriate action if multiple response objects are returned from a transaction within the composite transaction (for example, a search). The conditional logic supports error and exception management and the determination of which object to select. Support transaction dependency: Used to define dependent or independent transactions within the composite. Conditional execution: Used to define logic (the conditions) that defines whether a micro transaction should be run (for example, If value from search = X,
then execute update party address, else execute notification,

and so on).

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Iterative execution: Used to define a loop within the composite transaction for example, to run particular transactions for as many input objects provided in the request message (five party objects provided, then perform five party searches).

Java composite transactions WebSphere Customer Center supports the composition of composite transactions written in Java code. Clients can use standard Java development tools to create these transactions. Java transactions are supported as a single unit of work.

Extension and addition framework and wizard

WebSphere Customer Center maintains all client extensions through its extension framework. This framework maps extended data, transactions and rules to core product data, enabling system users to define where custom extensions are used within the core application. It also simplifies the upgrade process, which is done on the core product while extensions are maintained. The WebSphere Customer Center extension wizard is a toolkit that automates the process of creating extensions and additions, helping to reduce overall implementation time and cost. Clients can add data attributes to new addition tables or to core product tables. Extended data objects are created to manage the persistence of that data, and those objects are integrated with core product services through the Java inheritance model. This allows clients to seamlessly add new data attributes to the core products services and data tables, while still maintaining enough separation to permit future upgrades of the core product and still preserve the extension and additions.

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Administration user interface and administration services

The administration user interface allows system users to manage code table values, error messages, user and data grouping, data validation, and other configurable parameters within WebSphere Customer Center. WebSphere Customer Center also contains business services for maintaining all administration data.
External rules management

The WebSphere Customer Center external rules component controls access to business rules. WebSphere Customer Center contains a default business rules engine that clients can use to define custom business logic. In addition, clients can use other business rule tools or Java classes for custom logic. Business rules can be integrated with existing services using the pre- and post-exit points within those services.
Search framework

WebSphere Customer Center contains a search framework that includes a Structured Query Language (SQL) library for WebSphere Customer Center search functions, as well as an externalized search rule component for customizing search functions.
Inquiry framework

WebSphere Customer Center contains an inquiry framework that enables clients to build custom inquiry transactions within the WebSphere Customer Center architecture, allowing them to take advantage of common service components for their inquiry transactions (for example, rules of visibility).

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Data authentication and manipulation layer

The WebSphere Customer Center data authentication and manipulation layer is an abstraction layer between the logical business object layer and the WebSphere Customer Center inbound and outbound responses. This enables data to be translated and processes to be initiated before or after transactions, or both, performing functions such as aliasing, currency conversions and localization support.
Configuration manager

The configuration manager within WebSphere Customer Center manages product implementation and configuration. Configuration parameters can be updated by services to allow applications to programmatically determine configuration and runtime information. The configuration manager maintains audit history on configuration parameters. It also manages configuration data across multiple instances of the application (for example., a clustered environment).
Definable response object management

WebSphere Customer Center allows clients to define inquiry response levels (for example, level 100, 101 and so on) and to define the objects that should be returned for each custom level. For example, a Get Party transaction can return many objects related to the party, including all addresses, contact methods, identifiers, names, demographic details, income sources, privacy preferences, among many other objects. Clients can define an inquiry level to support a specific business channel or process that returns very specific data (for example, a party name and identifier only). This enhances usability of the services by allowing different inquiry variations to be supported using the same service request message (for example, only the response level in the message changes, the interface remains the same). This feature also improves performance by avoiding querying on data that is not required.

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Data model configuration

WebSphere Customer Center allows clients to define which objects are being used in their deployment and to turn off the unused areas. This allows the application to avoid unnecessary queries on some core inquiry and search services, thereby improving performance.
Code table management

WebSphere Customer Center contains business services (accessible using the administrator user interface [UI]) for updating and adding code table values. Most objects and the relationship between objects contain code table definitions, which enables clients to define custom definitions for their business requirements. WebSphere Customer Center contains gold data for various industries as a starter template for code table definitions.
Definable values

WebSphere Customer Center contains miscellaneous values objects that are associated with parties, accounts and addresses. The value types are definable by the client allowing them to use this object to store different value profiles for parties, contracts and locations. Examples include party risk-profile values and party marketing-insight value profiles. Definable values offer an alternative to building product extensions which are prepackaged within the core product (that is, there are business services for maintaining them and they are integrated with large-grain services).

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User interfaces

WebSphere Customer Center provides two user interface applications:

Data stewardship user interface

WebSphere Customer Center contains a separate user interface application for maintaining data quality within the core application, called the data stewardship application. The data stewardship application is designed to be the user interface for the internal administrators of customer data quality within the customer hub. All of the functionality offered through the data stewardship user interface is also available as a business service (action layer service), allowing companies to externalize data stewardship functions to other applications. The main functions of the data stewardship application are:

Search for suspect parties the ability to search for duplicate suspect parties based on userdefined parameters, including suspect relationship creation date, location and priority. View suspect party list the ability to view a list of the duplicate suspect parties based on the search parameters. The list includes a list of source parties and all suspects for those parties, as well as an indicator of whether the system matching rules have detected a best match (that is, the match score is over a defined threshold and the party match falls into a defined match category).

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Compare parties the ability to compare two suspect parties side-by-side to determine if they are the same party. Collapse parties the ability to collapse two parties into one new party. The previous two parties are inactivated and the new party is created from the other two. Collapse parties with rules the ability to use system defined rules of trust to autocollapse two parties. The default rule utilizes the rules engine to compare last update dates and is designed to be configurable for each client.

Mark and unmark suspects the ability to unmark two parties as suspects, or to manually mark two parties as suspects.

Administration user interface The WebSphere Customer Center administration user interface contains functions used to configure and manage the application. Functions include: code table management, error message management, rules of visibility and data entitlements, extension framework, data element and group definition, and user and user group definition. Conclusion WebSphere Customer Center contains multiple components that allow it to be an active, intelligent, real-time customer data integration solution. The knowledge layer persists all current and historical customer master data. The action layer comprises business services that maintain data in the knowledge layer. The intelligence layer is accessed by action services and it adds business rules and

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event management intelligence to operationalize transactions. The integrity layer is accessed by action services and maintains data quality within the knowledge layer. The performance layer contains components for fine-tuning and enhancing transaction performance. The integration layer contains published interfaces that allow vendor components to be integrated with core action layer business services. The interface layer is responsible for integrating action services with external applications using multiple interface methods. A complete customer data integration (CDI) solution must contain all of the components mentioned before in order to offer significant functionality and flexibility to configure the application as required. The intelligence and integrity components enable the CDI solution to be a smart and active operational system that responds to events in real time and contains business logic to support action services that manage data across multiple lines of business. WebSphere Customer Center is the recognized leader in the CDI market because of its broad and unique functionality, its ability to support configurations for specific business requirements while maintaining a core product upgrade path, and its ability to perform in demanding transaction load environments. For more information To learn more about IBM WebSphere Customer Center software, visit: ibm.com/software/data/masterdata/launch.html

 Copyright IBM Corporation 2006 IBM Corporation Software Group 8200 Warden Avenue Markham, Ontario L6G 1C7 Canada

Produced in the United States of America 04-06 All Rights Reserved

CICS, IBM, the IBM logo, WebSphere and z/OS are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. Java and all Java-based trademarks are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States, other countries or both. Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. The IBM home page on the Internet can be found at ibm.com.

1 Gartner Group, Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Integration Hubs. John Radcliffe, April 2005

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