Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Strategy is an interesting beast. It typically begins at such a high level that it’s possible to make connections between virtually any goal and any effort of a strategic nature, like SOA. At the same time, simple connections between those goals and efforts can be of, well, strategic importance. For this entry, I wanted to take one of those typical goals and try to bring it into the world of SOA and make some of those connections. Some of you may read this and just go, “Well duh, that’s common sense” while others may find something of significant value. I’d really like to hear your feedback on this entry. Strategy is one of those areas where people would many people in the trenches want to contribute, yet ultimately feel disconnected from it or that it doesn’t impact them. At the other end of things, the strategy makers want things to ripple down the trenches and for individuals to know that they are contributing to strategic success, yet their work is easily dismissed as being “fluff” or “ivory tower.”

The topic for today is knowing your customer. There’s no doubt that many, many companies likely have some strategic goal that can be tied back to customer support. The March 2007 issue of Business 2.0 had an article on “The Quest for the Perfect Online Ad” and it all comes down to better targeted advertising, which in turn, means knowing your customers. I would venture to guess that most companies try to do this through some form of data warehouse and business intelligence system. So how does SOA come into the mix? There’s actually two ways that I envision it having a role. First, it can enable a greater level of visibility into customer actions, presuming there’s some system interaction associated with the customer’s actions (sorry brick and mortar guys, not much SOA can do). Let’s presume that the system they use is a monolithic application. Your only source of input are the boundaries of the solution. If it’s a web application, you’ll have a clickstream, which can be pretty good, as evidenced by the levels of personalization from Amazon.com. If it’s a thick app, you may be limited to just extracting information from your transactional store, representing only the end outcome of the user’s efforts.

SOA, if done properly, should make it much easier to capture the user’s actions for later analysis. You’ll break down that monolithic application into a collection of services. These services represent boundaries within the solution, and at those boundary points you can leverage standardized infrastructure to log incoming requests and outgoing responses. This is even better than a web clickstream, because there you have to recreate the web page and understand what data elements were shown to the user on the page. If you’ve got the service request and response that returned the raw data tagged with the customer identifier, you’ve saved yourself a bunch of work associated with removing the presentation components. By pulling those messages into your BI system and analyzing the content of the message, you should begin to gain more knowledge about your customers.

The second way that SOA should come into play is in providing access to the data warehouse and business intelligence system to personalize the user experience. Rather than strictly being a source of reporting information for some person to look at, the information gleaned from those systems can be made available as services and factored back into the interface presented to the customer.

You may read this and think this is all common sense, and I actually hope that’s the case. Sometimes, however, we’re so buried in the technology or tactical issues that we fail to take the time to think strategically. It would be very easy to build the application in a service oriented manner and never bother to make use of the fact that this content is available and could provide valuable information for improving the customer experience. This is part of thinking outside of the box and beyond the functionality at hand. Hopefully reading this entry, whether you think it is common sense or not, will help you do that!