Master Data Management for

Customer and Client Data

Customer information is one of the most valuable assets in an
organization. The explosive growth of the customer relationship
management (CRM) software industry is proof of this. Yet for many
organizations, investments in CRM software have not yielded the
expected return on investment.
The problem is that large organizations generally have more than
one CRM system due to departmental, geographical, and political
boundaries within IT organizations or because of M&A activities.
Compounding the problem, these applications have a myopic view
of the world and arent able to span processes that go beyond a
department or product line. For example, it is common for large banks
to have different customer systems by product (checking, brokerage,
insurance) with no visibility to track a customer from one system to
the next. This leads to missed up-sell and cross-sell opportunities,
inconsistent and often poor customer service, inability to differentiate
profitable customers from less profitable ones, and an overall loss in
brand value.
Master data management (MDM) for customer data allows companies
to maintain a rich reference store of customer information that
is synchronized with the transactional systems that rely on that
information. This ensures that all systems including packaged CRM
applications, customer service systems, and legacy systems are
working off the same information. MDM enables businesses to align
their customer information across existing systems and thus enable
cross-product and cross-business unit sales, marketing, and support
processes.
All master data, be it customer, product, vendor, etc., is inherently
linked and the problems of one domain affect the others. For example,
while customer data may be accurate, a bad product code could lead to
the wrong product being shipped to a customer. TIBCO Collaborative
Information Manager software enables organizations to manage all
types of master data from a single platform and to create relationships
between domains for example, associating a customer with a product.
The single platform approach allows organizations to start by building
a solution for one domain and incrementally expand to other domains
greatly improving chances of project success by starting with a small,
manageable problem.

AT A G L A N C E
TIBCO Collaborative Information Manager
software provides comprehensive master data
management for customer data via a flexible data
model, configurable out-of-the-box business
processes, multi-channel internal and external
synchronization, and analytics and reporting.

BENEFITS
Improves customer service by providing a
unified multi-channel customer experience.
Regardless of whether a customer interacts
through the store, the website, or a call center,
the experience will be seamless because all
systems will have the same comprehensive view
of information.
Improves cross-sell and up-sell opportunities
by providing a rules engine that can leverage a
unified view of the customer and recommend
products in real time.
Enables organizations to build a solution for
one domain and incrementally expand to other
domains (vendor, product, store, etc.) on the
same platform, lowering TCO and minimizing
cost and complexity.
Ensures that clean data stays clean by
automating master data creation and
maintenance processes and enforcing
data governance.
Builds a customer data services platform to
distribute data throughout the organization
using technologies such as web services API,
real-time integration, and a distributed highthroughput cache.

Master Data Management for Customer and Client Data

A ttrib u tes & C apabilities

Process-Centric Approach
TIBCO provides out-of-the-box configurable
processes to create and maintain customer
data. While many solutions focus on data
aggregation, TIBCO believes a process-centric
approach is critical in sustaining data integrity
over time.

Drawbacks of a Federated Approach to MDM

The federated approach to customer data management
has gotten some traction as one way to tackle the
problem. In this approach, customer data is not
persisted in a physical repository but accessed and
aggregated on-the-fly and presented to users as a
series of views into dispersed customer data. On the
positive side, it avoids political battles around data
ownership as it leaves data where it lies and accesses
and aggregates it dynamically. On the downside:

It does not address the issue of inaccurate, redundant,

or inconsistent customer data at the source. Rather than

fixing source data it merely puts a favorable virtual view
on top of the data to serve the needs of that particular
instance. Data quality remains as is.

It is designed for access only. If many systems have to

be updated to complete a transaction, the federated

solution will have to build complex handshaking and rollback logic to be viable.

It is only suitable for small-scale information movements

as it has to access many systems in real time and perform

in-memory aggregations, filtering, and transformation
on data that may not be optimized to be viewed in the
manner being requested.

Information management functionality such as validation,

versioning, and audit control is handled by the individual
systems and can be inconsistent or inadequate.

Flexible Data Model

A CRM system typically only maintains a subset
of information about a customer; the rest is
scattered across systems or in spreadsheets.
TIBCOs flexible data model allows organizations
to build a comprehensive view of the customer
not dictated by the constraints of any one

application. Unlike most customer data

solutions, data warehouses, and monolithic
applications, TIBCO provides easy mechanisms
to modify and hot deploy changes to the data
model to incorporate new business
requirements.
The Power of Events
TIBCOs solution is built on an event-driven
architecture. TIBCO, in real time, can capture,
process, and respond to customer events such
as a customer updating information from a
portal or making a service call. This agility
and ability to identify customer interaction
patterns across channels is critical for enabling
new solutions such as dynamic cross-sell or
proactive service before a problem escalates.
Advanced Relationship and
Hierarchy Management
TIBCOs solution does not limit relationships
to client-subsidiary or household.
Relationships are configurable, with rules and
inheritance. Relationships can be within a data
domain or across different domains such as
between a client and a product. This level
of depth is essential for consolidated billing,
cross-sell, up-sell, and consistent multi-channel
service.
Highly Available Real-Time Customer Data
TIBCO leverages its strengths in integration
and distributed computing to provide highly
available real-time data across the enterprise.
With features like a web services API,
embedded JMS client, distributed cache,
and process-based synchronization, TIBCO
Collaborative Information Manager ensures
that applications, services, and portals have
clean, consistent customer data.

www.tibco.com
TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX) digitized Wall Street in the 80s with its event-driven Information
Bus software, which helped make real-time business a strategic differentiator in the 90s. Today, TIBCOs
infrastructure software gives customers the ability to constantly innovate by connecting applications and data
in a service-oriented architecture, streamlining activities through business process management, and giving
people the information and intelligence tools they need to make faster and smarter decisions, what we call
The Power of Now . TIBCO serves more than 3,000 customers around the world with offices in more than 20
countries and an ecosystem of over 200 partners. Learn more at www.tibco.com.
2008, TIBCO Software Inc. All rights reserved. TIBCO, the TIBCO logo, The Power of Now, TIBCO Software, and TIBCO Collaborative Information Manager are trademarks or registered
trademarks of TIBCO Software Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective
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