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Integra provides the capability to interpret variations and ambiguities in source customer data in multiple operational systems and to maintain a repository of the various possible forms of the data. It automatically resolves ambiguities in customer data representations, including consideration of phonetics, abbreviations, character case and filed sequence. Integra enables matching of customers across systems, and facilitates propagation of changes to customer data in one operational system through to other participating systems.
Integra does not require any change to the user interfaces, application code or data structures of existing systems. It does not require the creation of a new enterprise-wide customer number. It can receive, process and automatically propagate changes to customer data in real-time.
Other strategies to identify and synchronise customer data have significant disadvantages by comparison to Integra -
Data scrubbing - data is extracted, matched and loaded back into its source systems - however, during the scrubbing period, the source data may have changed. Further, the separate source systems can still be updated independently in the future, so new discrepancies get introduced. In addition, data scrubbing allows only one parsed interpretation of the source data Change data entry screens - user data entry screens are changed to support a common data model. Only a single source of update is allowed, so multiple original applications need to be changed to disable direct updates. New updates must be propagated to all data stores, user procedures must be changed Change applications to use a common data model - individual applications and their data bases could be changed to use a common model, or even to access a single customer database. This involves significant change and complexity
Integra provides significant cost-effectiveness in building and maintaining a single customer view by comparison to these other techniques.
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