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Who Needs Direct Information
Delivery?
To leverage the investments made in IT systems, the imperative is to
deliver required data on demand to all business users
-- sales, support, manufacturing, supply chain partners, and even
customers. However, the user adoption of
IT systems has been poor
due to:
- Complexity:
Business users cannot deal with the complexity of
new IT systems. They instead prefer to use simple
tools such as Excel, e-mail and portal.
- Not on my touch point:
Business users are
typically technology averse, and like to get information using only their
current desktop tools or wireless devices. Making them change their
behavior is difficult.
- Multiple back-end
applications: Users
need information from multiple systems to complete the picture, but
are not willing to learn the multiple systems.
Businesses, however, do not have the time/money to build new
application interfaces and train the users. This mandates that
information be delivered directly on existing information access
tools such as email, spreadsheets, wireless devices, desktop
application screens and portal pages.
What is Information Integration and
Delivery?
Information Integration and Delivery is about providing real-time and unified information from enterprise
data stores directly on business user's tools, but without exposing
any of the internal details to the business users.
The Information Services, broadly speaking, are a logically
grouped set of information elements, extracted from data sources
about an information entity such as a "customer ID".
An information service may have information elements combined from
multiple data sources, or could have the results from a transform
operation on the original data. For example, a Customer
Information service may take a customer ID and return the Customer
name, address, phone number, and credit rating. The end-users
can view and consume this service without knowing that the customer
name, address and phone numbers have come from their back-end CRM
application, while the credit rating has come from their custom
database application or a SOAP service.
The Extensio Multi-Channel Information Delivery
Platform
Extensio creates a SOA-based information-access and delivery layer that
uses information services to extract the information elements residing in enterprise data store by its extraction, transformation and unification
engines. The
processed information elements are then converted into the front-end
specific format, and then delivered to the user access points by means of Extensio front-ends Extenders such as Excel,
SMS/WAP, desktop
client, and web service.
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