The virtual shortcut
- Article 4 of 6
- Database Marketing, October 2005
Merging customer-referenced data into one database is no simple task. Could there be an easier way? Robert Buckley finds out
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | All 3 Pages
With the records stored in separate databases, however, de-duping is a harder task since deleting a duplicate will require the permission of the dataset’s owner, something that may not be granted. There will also be the usual issues associated with deleting or merging duplicates in operations datasets: with a single, separate marketing database, it’s possible to delete and merge records incorrectly, usually with only minimal ill effects; in an operational database, these kinds of operations need to be done with absolute certainty.
Even cleaning is likely to be harder. Terry Hiles, MD of Capscan, points out that while a marketer may want an address stored in one format, “the individual database owners don’t want you mucking around with their records, might not want an address stored in that format and won’t thank you for deciding that you have the authority and wisdom to dump data from their records.”
As well as cleaning the databases at the beginning of the operation there needs to be a way to keep all the databases clean. Says CDMS’s Clarke, “If you’ve got different databases and they’re being updated by different means by the call centre, secretaries, those kind of groups, you do need a central cleaning place so the cleaning process is the same for all databases.” Without consistent maintenance of all the databases, the virtual single view will begin to lose its authority and cohesiveness.
Cleansing on the fly, in which these activities are done as the system pulls together records for the single view, may be possible, but Ed Wrazen, VP International of Trillium Software cautions that this can be complex, since it adds additional integration layers on top of the integration already required to pull together the databases. “Effectively, you’re creating spiders’ webs of complexity and information, that logistically are quite difficult to manage. There are also limitations in terms of the technology being able to provide the performance necessary.”
The virtual single view will also generally require a master-slave relationship between the databases, with one database – usually the cleanest and most complete – taking precedence in cleaning operations. This will typically also be the database that marketing has most control over and which is in the best format for marketing operations. When in doubt, the customer billing is usually the best master to pick.
The complexities involved in the virtual view mean that many companies eschew the virtues of real-time insight into customers in favour of the traditional single marketing database with regular ETL updates from other data sources.
Colm O'Hara, database manager at EuroDirect, says that regulatory and operational reasons prevent his firm, which creates and hosts single customer views for a number of companies, from using virtual views. “We’ve been able to use strong name and address matching capabilities since we don’t use a virtual view. We probably couldn’t even use a virtual view for compliance reasons: how could you provide evidence for your decisions in a virtual view?”
Similarly, Shelagh Regester of CACI client services director says that it’s operationally easier for CACI to go for a standard integration approach rather than the virtual view. “The issue with having a virtual view is that because of the hit that obviously makes on central processing, it makes it harder to plan operational work since you’re making ad hoc use of the ‘juice’. Frankly, the tools available for the front end are so good at holding massive datasets, it’s the just the same as creating a virtual view anyway.”
Similarly, Arthur Kay of Synaxis says that few of his clients are interested in virtual view technology once they see what a single integrated database is capable of doing. “The virtual view shouldn’t be seen as a way of achieving a single customer view, not if marketing messages are important to you.”
While CDMS’s Clarke claims that Unica’s universal data interconnect technology can interface with pretty much any database to create a virtual database, others are not so sure that a virtual view is so simple. Phil Good, founder and MD of Hopewiser, highlights the problems of accessing legacy systems that don’t provide standard interfaces and which will require coding to extract data. “Somewhere like Shell or BP, where the systems have been around 20 years and the guy who programmed them has left, if you ask them to stick a web wrapper round the systems so you can access them, they’ll just say, ‘I don’t think so, mate.’”
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | All 3 Pages