Tom Inman

INMAN:Hello, this is Tom Inman, I'm the Vice President of Strategy and Marketing for IBM's Information Management Solutions division. And I'm here to talk to you about information as a service or a key starting point in the Getting Started project in SOA.

This is one of a series of SOA entry points, and I will cover information centric and information as a service approaches to SOA.

So the value that we're focused on is helping our clients to improve business insight and reduce risk with trusted information -- information that can be delivered as a service, can be delivered in line to the business process, and in context to what that business process and that group of people that needed the information, what they're focused on doing.

Let me give you an example. We worked with Volkswagen to help increase productivity of the procurement staff by 20 percent. Their findings were that their procurement team was spending about 70 percent of its time searching for relevant information and only 30 percent of the time acting on it and adding value to the information in the procurement process.

We helped to information enable, deliver information as a service, to the procurement process, and allowed them to convert those ratios where 70 percent of the time was spent adding value and streamlining the activities resulting in 20 percent productivity improvement to procurement staff.

So we tend to start with, by discovering and understanding the information sources that exist in the business, the relationship of the information, and the business context to how that information is supposed to be used.

Let me give you an example. In retail banking, every one of the products or services in the bank, a home mortgage, an auto loan, has customer information in it. But if the bank wants to treat its customer holistically to know who that customer is and all the relationships it has, it needs to extract customer information from each of those operational systems and integrate the customer information and then deliver that information back as a service to any business process, application or group of people who need to use it.

So we start by creating, understanding the information sources, the relationships and the business context, and we create a reusable highvalue service first. Over time we may expand the number and scope of information services that we have available across internal and external processes.

Let me give you another example. We worked with Bell Canada, and Bell Canada was trying to achieve a better relationship with its customers, focus the organization on what they call customer centricity.

They created a customer master to provide service agents with a complete view of the customer across all relationships they had with their customers. But they had a data warehouse in place, and they were [used] processing and rules from that data warehouse to integrate customer data across operational systems and help feed that information to a customer master file.

Now that they have the customer master in place, they leverage that customer information as a service to provide master customer information to all the channel applications. And by that I mean, the retail stores, the call center, the Internet channel -- any place where they touched their customers as a channel, they have an integrated view of customer information. It helped them to improve marketing and selling and customer experience with Bell Canada.

The benefits beyond that were reuse benefits by creating this customer service and reusing that customer master information the second time they needed to use that it cost them only 2.5 percent of the cost of building it in the first place once they went to reuse it. So, a significant reuse benefit.

Another example is a company called Lord Abbett, a financial firm in the US. Their business challenge like many financial firms was to increase visibility for compliance purposes.

When banks and financial firms have to comply to regulatory bodies it's largely reporting back information about their customers, the products they sold to them, you know, et cetera.

They created an SOA based information service to ensure consistent financial data. They ensured integration and compliance with enterprise standards and data models and systems, creating a shared financial reporting service.

It allows them to now reduce risk and improve their ability to comply with new regulations through this consistent and reusable information service, again, for compliance purposes.

Another example, leveraging a different part of our technology base, is what we've done with store brand out of the Nordics in Europe. We helped them speed time to market for new life insurance, pension and asset management products.

They used a technology of ours called DB2 Viper and XML or Extensible Markup Language, a language that's very familiar to developers and architects, and created new business logic around these products, these new services they wanted to introduce.

And they could respond very, very quickly to market in creating new products. Through Web Services and DB2 Viper, they can now accept orders 24 by seven online and control transaction flows to the existing backend legacy systems. So they built new business logic quickly on the front to support the introduction of new products and got to the back end business logic of the transaction systems very, very quickly.

They believe that this new DB2 Viper based SOA solution is going to allow them to process significantly more business in the same period of time thus growing their market share in the markets that they're in.

A final example, and then I'll wrap up with some new product and enhancements, is what we've done with Met Life. They wanted to shift their business strategy from one of being product focused to one of being centered around their customers.

They'd worked with IBM for a number of years building up a J2EE WebSphere based architecture for many applications. One of those was a value based pricing analytics application to drive cross sell and up sell opportunities across their products and services to their customers.

They then created this unified customer view that I talked about already supporting customer satisfaction and privacy regulations and combined that with the value pricing analytics engine and now they're able to serve their customers better and real time be able to cross sell and up sell and got significant reuse out of the infrastructure they've built.

So how do you do this? Well, you treat the information as a service. You create reusable information services like customer information, or product information, or employee information, that can be reused by multiple processes, applications and groups of people.

So we do that sort of thing with our master data management portfolio: master data management around customer, master data management around product, as an example. And we've got significant enhancements we're making to this part of our portfolio.

And combining our WebSphere customer centered product that gives us a single view of customer information, with some capabilities we have in information warehousing. And as an example, in banking we've enhanced our banking information warehouse, in insurance, our insurance application architecture, and integrated that with our customer center.

We have models in retail banking and insurance for customer information, for policy information, and we've been able to combine the models with our master data management software around customer and product in those industries to significantly accelerate time to value for introducing customer centric and product centric master data systems to enhance the relationships with their customers and improve profitability.

Another new enhancement we've made is around an offering called WebSphere RFID premises server. Now, RFID -- Radio Frequency Identification -- allows you to track physical asset movement. And that happens at all sorts of industries, in retail product movement; in pharmaceutical, product movement around drugs, as an example.

So with the RFID premises server we deliver the flexibility to integrate and provide information on these physical assets as they move through the value chain. We allow functionality to filter and route and to figure where these assets ought to go.

We interpret and correlate the RFID events, and we can make better local decisions, so we can feed that information back into some information value chain.

And let me link that back to the conversation we just had around a single view of product information, as an example. We might track the movement out at the end points through RFID as it moves through its location and move that back into a product information management system.

So we're combining our capabilities here, we've got significant enhancements in RFID server and in the master data portfolio.

Another new enhancement which was used at [Lord Abbott] for their compliance backbone and it was used underneath these master data customer examples I gave, is a technology we call WebSphere Information Services. It's a service based access to data, data of all forms in different formats, the ability to connect to information, to data sources, and be able to cleanse it and transform it and move it to where it needs to be used. Giving a trusted view of information spanning all heterogeneous sources of information.

And lastly, significant new capabilities in our data server with DB2 Viper, the first hybrid data server in the industry including native XML and relational data services support for greater business insight and much greater and much faster time to market for newly developed applications.

And the first development of this sort of capability to be delivered in SOA solutions on Linux, UNIX, Windows, and on native zSeries systems platforms as well.

So that's a little bit about information centric entry points into SOA, and I'd like to thank you for listening. For more information or to contact IBM you can do so at . Thank you very much.

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