Looking across companies who are either piloting or actively pursuing Service-Oriented Architecture frameworks to support their business strategies, more and more of them are aimed at accentuating, strengthening, and making more efficient selling and service strategies. Cost reductions surrounding database and data warehouse consolidations, reducing integration costs by getting out of hand-built adapter hell, and getting pricing, configuration, quoting, and service data to sales reps when they need it are also key goals of their strategies. Yet the vision that the CIOs I’ve spoken with is this: they want all relevant data for a customer on the screens of sales and service reps so intelligent decisions can be made quickly on margins, pricing, cross-selling, and up-selling. The want their information to become aggressive in its own right; they want a transformation of strategies based on making an SOA framework that can synchronize market signals back to sales, production, fulfillment and service.

The Era of Aggressive Intelligence

There is an ephinany happening in these early adopter companies who are focused on using SOA frameworks to kick-start their customer-facing strategies. It’s the fact that once databases, data warehouses, data marts and even product configuration data is unleashed to support applications that make more focused customer strategies possible an entirely new dynamic emerges around the intelligence itself: it becomes more aggressive, more focused on goals, and ultimately a larger contributor to the company’s goals being met or exceeded. SOA early adopters are finding a maturity model emerging around the competitive value of information based on its applicability to customer-facing strategies, and it’s again not about the software, it’s about the business strategies getting fueled with more accurate, precise data.

Pricing and compliance are the areas where CIOs really want to have their data deliver aggressive intelligence. To counter a competitor through the use of agent-based technology, routed through BPEL-based workflows, all transparent to the agent or sales rep, that captures a new account or keep an existing one from defecting is what one mortgage company today is betting on to drive up customer lifetime value. Reducing churn through the use of this new form of aggressive intelligence delivered through intelligent agents is where one cable company wants to be as well. The fact that pricing exceptions, also called special pricing requests, have long been a goldmine of untapped businesses for companies that choose to automate this process. In the financial services industry one CIO told me that they are piloting a Web Service to handle all pricing exceptions to allow for sales reps, sales managers and directors to spend more time where it matters most, which is in front of the largest customers. Intelligent agents and Web Services are just two of the ways CIOs are looking to capitalize on their SOA framework pilots to create intelligence that isn’t just historical or analytical, it’s aggressive in its use to win new business and retain existing customers.

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