Active enterprise intelligence is more than just a sum of its parts. Taken by themselves, the words "active," "enterprise" and "intelligence" have powerful distinct connotations; their punch is much stronger when combined and added to the context of integrated information and strategy.

The power of active enterprise intelligence lies in an organization's ability to make timely, relevant and significant business and customer decisions in a dynamic environment. These decisions are based on a single view of the data that is received and analyzed across an entire organization.

enlarge When combined, active enterprise intelligence and customer data integration (CDI) can lead businesses to a higher level of customer service performance.

To effectively apply active enterprise intelligence, customers' data must be kept accurate, current and readily available within the organization and across multiple channels and business lines. This is achieved through customer data integration (CDI), the tool that combines the technology, processes and services required to create and maintain a complete view of the customers' data. Customer data integration is designed to:

	Identify duplicate customers across multiple transaction systems.
	Apply data cleansing, matching and merging rules to create and store a single and complete version of the customer in a central hub.
	Maintain the definitive record in real time as the transactional information changes.
	Provide customer information access to applications and individuals across the organization.

By itself, CDI can boost cross-sell, marketing, profitability and customer satisfaction objectives, moving the organization closer, but not entirely, to "active." What is missing is the "intelligence"—the ability to analyze customers' data and apply strategic insight to their daily activities.

The figure above illustrates how active enterprise intelligence, together with CDI, can bridge the gap between strategic intelligence yielded through analytics and operational intelligence required to service customers on the front line.

The caveat: business process change
Combining CDI with a technology approach allows employees to make day-to-day decisions that satisfy the customers while benefiting the organization. However, technology alone will not cause active enterprise intelligence to happen; organizations must also ensure their culture is customer-focused and their business processes are aligned to handle the new flow of information.

One highly ranked airline company has made customer satisfaction a top priority by understanding that customer-centricity begins with employees. The company identified which areas in its organization affect the customers' traveling experiences the most and refocused the job descriptions of employees in those departments. These specific employees are given access to the increased flow of information so they can positively impact customers. (See "In-flight service," below.)

In-flight service When U.S. air travel was halted on 9/11, thousands of fliers were stranded at airports across the country. One airline used flight manifests and consolidated customer data to locate its high-value customers and provide them with personalized care and immediate assistance in finding lodging, rental cars and priority routing for their flights home. Contrast this to most other airline passengers—frequent fliers included—who endured hours of lines, long call-hold times, and travel and lodging uncertainty. Providing personalized service to high-value customers is active enterprise intelligence at its best. —L.L.

Active enterprise intelligence at work
Organizations and technology vendors realize the power afforded by creating a single, unified, definitive view of the customer and providing this view to all applications and users across the enterprise. Companies are spending large amounts of IT dollars to accomplish this, and vendors are focusing significant research and development efforts on furnishing technology to make it easier to accomplish.

The benefit of CDI is enormous, particularly when combined with active enterprise intelligence. This strategic data analysis helps to ensure customer interactions are timely, significant and relevant. Leveraging these strategies can positively impact the bottom line of organizations as better knowledge eliminates unnecessary expenditures, facilitates business process improvements and increases the effectiveness of customer strategies. "Playing the odds," right, illustrates this benefit.

Businesses that are leaders in customer relationship management (CRM) are also taking steps to stop the proliferation of multiple customer data stores across the enterprise; instead, the information is compiled in a single unified data store. Implementing an active data warehouse and embedding the CDI capabilities into and around this single structure should be an important consideration for any organization serious about practicing active enterprise intelligence. T

Lisa Loftis is a senior vice president for Intelligent Solutions and a CRM and business intelligence (BI) expert. She is also a speaker and co-authored the book Building the Customer-Centric Enterprise. Lisa can be reached at lloftis@verizon.net.

Illustration by Jean Tuttle

Teradata Magazine-March 2007