Can you coordinate your decisions across the enterprise so that customer service is fast and complete? In a modern architecture, it is possible to facilitate coordinated decisions from a localized to a global level. A 20th-century systems architecture would not be capable of achieving this goal.
It’s a common joke that the left hand of an organization doesn’t know about the right hand. We laugh about it when it happens, but it usually hinders our efforts and leads to confusing actions, results, and inefficiencies within the organization. The result is an organization that is slow to respond to the needs and issues facing its customers. It is not unusual for the employee of the organization to joke that the company is uncoordinated and does not work together. There is no customer service enhancement from these jokes; it’s just a simple laugh to get by a bad, and probably embarrassing, situation.
Updated Decision Making Architecture
In the 21st century, we can have coordinated decisions throughout our organization. To do this, information from a local service provider, retail store, or data center is coordinated with the information across the entire enterprise. This coordination begins with a local decision-making engine, which dictates some decisions while leaving other assessments for national or enterprise decision engines. By coordinating the conclusions that each group within the organization makes within the local decision engine, and communicating those to each other, we now make the whole the sum of all the parts.
This architecture would be incredibly difficult to understand for anyone who is not familiar with TIBCO Software technology. There’s the coordination of BusinessEvents and ActiveSpaces with a persistent messaging layer and an integration layer across all portions of the company, and allows for a completely functional and intelligent organization. This intelligent business understands the right hand, the left hand, and all the feet. All assets of the organization are completely coordinated to create rapid responses to the issues facing the company.
Applications of Coordinated Decision Making
Let’s look at some applications of this concept in three different industries: retail, service, and logistics.
In retail, it is common for customers to expect prompt and immediate service for the issues pertaining to them. They want to know how their interaction with that store results in incentives, such as an additional discount, a better deal, more loyalty points, or faster delivery time. Waiting for that information to cross telecommunication systems, then proceed to a corporate server in a data center far away is fairly inefficient and quite frustrating. It’s far more efficient for the answer to be shared as quickly as possible to the customer by utilizing infrastructure that’s in place at the retail store.
Other decisions within the organization may be less time critical or need to leverage a wider body of data (perhaps the organization’s Big Data Hadoop implementation). These can wait for a longer response time and can be done at the enterprise decision layer. The customer doesn’t have to be present in order to make these types of decisions; therefore, the decision engine can be located at the enterprise decision layer. Coordinating the immediate decisions that impact customer behavior and happiness, with the less immediate decisions that can be saved for enterprise decisions layer, allows for an organization to have a coordinated response both from a customer-facing perspective as well as at an enterprise level.
The service industry application is very similar to retail. The information that is pertinent in serving clients while they are standing in line, or getting their product worked on, must be processed locally and quickly, without the confines of telecommunications delays. Other decisions not requiring rapid information can wait to be sent on to an enterprise server.
Logistics operate in a similar way for routine transportation of goods that are distributed across the country. Information about the stock, local customers, and local delivery mechanisms, which are unique to any given location, should be localized for immediate response. Decisions about information between several locations should be handled at the enterprise level. This allows immediate responses to be created on demand and long-term responses to be executed at an enterprise level.
TIBCO technology allows your organization to have a coordinated and accurate response to your customers. Important decisions happen at the essential speed for prompt customer interaction with minimal overhead and duplication of data. To learn more, explore our white paper: Four Clues Your Organization Suffers from Inefficient Integration, ERP Integration Part 1.
