10 Best Practices for Integrating your Customer Data

10 Best Practices for Integrating Your Customer Data

Paul Varley, Director of Product Management
Pierre Hulsebus, Senior Sales Engineer
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Housekeeping

• Phone lines are muted

• Presentation is approximately 60 minutes
• Use the “Questions” area of GTW to submit your questions

• Questions will be addressed at the end of the presentation or by
email follow up.


Agenda
• Introductions
• The 10 Best Practices
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You Say Integration, I Say Integration
Have a Plan…With a Measurable Outcome
The Real Budget
Know Thy Systems
Map Twice, Integrate Once
Garbage In, Garbage Out
Selecting An Approach
Design vs Performance
Setting Expectations
Customer Involvement


About the Presenters

Paul Varley – Director, Product Management

Paul.Varley@scribesoft.com

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Pierre Hulsebus – Senior Sales Engineer

Pierre.Hulsebus@scribesoft.com
@Infuseme


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• Integration is a broad term.
• Drill down to the specifics of the business problem first.
• It’s possible that integration is not the optimal solution to the problem.
• Have a common definition and understanding between you and your customer of what the
integration will do as an end goal. For example:
- Eliminate manual data entry.
- Automate a business process.
- Provide missing information for a report or reports.

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Have a Plan with a Measurable Outcome

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Have a Plan with a Measureable Outcome
• Your integration project should be focused on something tangible and valuable to your
business.
- Avoid the “we need to integrate our Sales & Marketing data!” imperative.

• Start modestly and build on your successes.
- If your goal is large or complex, chunk it up into bite-sized projects that have a very specific
deliverable.
- Tightly defined projects with very clear outcomes are usually the most successful.
- Most integration projects can layer on each other – you don’t need to boil the ocean in the first
phase.

• Pick metrics with your customer that you both feel will show the success of the integration.

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Your Real Budget

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Your Real Budget
• Include generous estimates for research and learning curve.
• Make sure you understand any new costs that will arise from the integration:
- Vendors sometime charge for API transactions.
- You may need extra licenses or different licenses to access the system.
- You may need to purchase or upgrade software or hardware.

• If you’re planning on using a new integration tool or platform, include time and money for
training.

• Include the costs of on-going maintenance of the integration in your initial budget:
- Who is going to “own” the integrations (and the tools used)?
- What training do they need? (and ongoing training)?
- Will we need professional services in the future for upgrades, etc?

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Know Thy Systems

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Know Thy Systems
• It’s a good idea to manually enter data in your target systems and document the behavior of
that data before you integrate:
- New or changed data can trigger workflows or other cascading effects that you didn’t bargain for
(and may be very difficult to undo).

• Understand your application or data source limitations:
- API throttling – time of day, number of transactions, etc.
- What the API can and cannot do.
- Alternate data access methods your vendor may offer (CSV file extract, direct database access,
etc).
- Know the data access techniques your vendor endorses (and supports) and which ones they don’t’.
- What data your vendors gives access to and what it doesn’t.

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• Spend the time to document your mappings and workflows before you choose any integration
approach or tool.
- Excellent way to suss out issues well before you start the project (and how to handle them).
- Excellent tool for discussion with customer if you have questions about how data should be
transformed or presented.

• Your integration design will be extremely helpful for picking the appropriate integration
approach and platform.
- You’ll have all the questions to ask your vendor, consultant, etc ahead of time.
- You do not want to go down one path with an approach only to discover it won’t fit your needs after
all.

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Garbage In
Garbage Out

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Garbage In, Garbage Out
• Integration will not fix bad business processes or bad data.
• Bad data or bad process is the single biggest reason why integration projects and the
applications are perceived to be “bad” or “not right for the company”.

• You may have to “fix” the garbage before you integrate – there are many approaches to doing
this:
- Might be a separate project focused on removing dupes, old data, etc.
- May be handled in-stream during integration with formulas and transformations.
- May choose to synchronize a subset of data that fits a particular criteria (data less than 6 months
old).
- Etc.

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Selecting An Approach

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Selecting an Approach
• There is no “the one club in the bag” – it is reasonable to expect that you might have 2 or
more integration approaches over time.

• Consider both the project and the person maintaining/using the integration approach in the
future when you pick your approach.
- Sometimes a more limited tool is better if the person has to do things quickly, easily, and lower
cost.
- Sometimes a broader platform is better if you know you’ll be doing a lot of integrations in the future
to a lot of different things.

• Pick the right approach for your business, needs, budgets, and appetite.
- That might not be the trendy new thing in CIO Magazine or Computerworld.
- Lots of options to choose from today.

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Design & Performance

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Design & Performance
• There will always be tension between speed and complexity. Rarely can you have both great
speed and great complexity, so plan accordingly.
- You may have to do multiple passes to get what you need.

• Integration tools and approaches can be hampered by the vendor and other outside factors.
- API speeds, throttling. Not all APIs are designed for performance.
- Things like databases could be hampered by hardware resources, index/table design,
configurations, etc.
- Network latency can be an issue with cloud integrations. Don’t expect speed on your single T1 for
your 500 employees and your cloud integration.

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• Clear and constant dialogue with your customer is a must.
• Explain to the customer factors that might put the project at risk or that you may have no
control over.

• Your customer may have very unrealistic expectations or doesn’t understand technologies.
Have that conversation and dig deep to uncover any “technology beliefs”:
- “we have to have 1 billion records updated every night in a 30 minute window”
- “we expect that we should be loading 10,000 records a second”
- “why can’t we spread the processing on everyone’s desktop or laptop like SETI and it will be really
fast then”

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Happy Customer, Successful Project

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Happy Customer, Successful Project
• Keep your customer busy throughout the project:
- Validate processes as you go along.
- Frequent user acceptance testing in a demo system is key.
- Have frequent check-ins and status updates.

• The more involved the customer, the better success of the project.

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• Beginning the week of February 17th

www.scribesoft.com/webinars
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Contact Us
• Paul Varley – Director, Product Management

• Pierre Hulsebus – Senior Sales Engineer

• Paul.Varley@scribesoft.com

• Pierre.Hulsebus@scribesoft.com
• @Infuseme

www.scribesoft.com

Questions?
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10 Best Practices for Integrating your Customer Data

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Editor's Notes