EFFECTIVE CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT THROUGH WEB SERVICES

JAYMEEN R. SHAH Texas State University - San Marcos San Marcos, Texas 78666 MIRZA B. MURTAZA Middle Tennessee State University Murfreesboro, Tennessee

ABSTRACT Managing cfTective relationships with customers has become increasingly important in the era of constrained resources and global competition. The term Customer Relationship Management (CRM) encompasses all methodologies, strategies, tools, and other technology-based capabilities that help an enterprise organize and manage its customer relationships. The focus of CRM is on providing optimal value to customers through pre-sale interactions, sales process, and post-sale interactions. Especially for companies doing business online, either completely or partly, CRM is essential for a long-term survival and success. A major prerequisite to an efficient CRM effort is the complete view ofthe customer, which in tum requires data - a data that is complete, accurate, current, and in the right format. An equivalent of CRM in the business-to-business arena is Partner Relationship Management (PRM). For successful PRM also what is required is business-to-business application and data integration. This paper presents an overview of the issues related to lack of data consistency, and difficulties of data/application integration within a business and inter-business environments. It also discusses how emerging Intemet standards and Web services can be used to alleviate data/application integration problems. Keywords: Web Services. Web Applications, Customer Relationship Management CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT Maintaining good customer relationships is imperative for companies seeking growth and profit in today's global and competitively fierce market. A responsive and top-quality customer service is one of the key factors for achieving sustainable competitive advantage (22). Many forward-looking companies have undertaken customer relationship initiatives to build and maintain customer satisfaction and loyalty. However, several CRM initiatives have failed miserably in returning any significant benefits to a company. Some ofthe main reasons for such failures include the fact that quite a few businesses fail to recognize that CRM requires enterprise-wide commitments. CRM must be supported by management at all levels of an enterprise in order to provide any benefit to its customer and to the company itself To be effective, CRM strategy requires interaction with the customer: that is, a business must monitor all of the customer touch points store, telephone. Web site, etc. to acquire customer preferences and interests at every opportunity. Another requirement of a successful strategy is data integration; the data that is collected at every opportunity must be linked in such a way that the complete knowledge about a specific customer is always available. A third requirement of a Fall 2005

good CRM strategy is access and availability of current data to the employees who can use and benefit from it during the customer interactions. One of the most critical factors for the success of CRM initiatives is accurate customer data. For the entire organization to benefit from CRM, enterprise-wide CRM application must be integrated with all other enterprise systems (6). Additionally for the success of a CRM initiative, it is required that a business has the complete picture of a customer. T^e same customer might be shopping in the store, through catalog and telephone order, and through the use of World Wide Web, Marketers must identily that customer if they want to build a lasting customer relationship. Complete knowledge of the customer is the key to providing exceptional customer service, and assisting the company in cross-selling and/or upselling. Without customer data integration, gaining the complete view of a customer is impossible. The other important issue is of poor data quality due to age or omission of data. For example, if the company database has incomplete or old mailing address, or an email address that is either invalid or non-operational, it will be impossible to identify or contact the customer. One of the major changes that have taken place in the age of Intemet is that today's information systems are outwardfacing instead of inward-facing systems of 1970s and 1980s. The inward-facing information systems were either productoriented or process-oriented. The outward-facing information systems of today are customer-centric. These systems promote seamless interactions between businesses and their customers to build strong customer relationships. These systems provide both informational and transactional services. The dot-coms of 90s, especially the unsuccessful ones, wrongly assumed that the only promise and obligation of the Intemet is to offer products at a lower cost. These businesses soon realized that the term 'value' includes a lot more than price alone. The primary distinguishing factors of a successful business are the sales channel, the price, and the quality of customer service (29). What is required is building, developing, and maintaining relationships with the good customers throughout the customer life-cycle. A significant initial cost of acquiring new customers exists, and not providing a valuable experience to a customer will result in unimaginable loss of opportunities for the company. There are a wide variety of CRM systems in the market that target various kinds of companies. According to Kaneshige, Forrester Research believes that the CRM revenues will grow from $42.8 billion to $73.8 billion during the next five years (16). However, it is a fact that an existing company cannot ovemight install a CRM system that is ready to run. Every corporation has processed and stored all kinds of data related to financial, marketing, operations, and accounting functions for years. These data are processed and used by various types of 98

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applications being used by different functional departments. Therefore they may reside on different types of computing platforms and in different kinds of data formats that make them difficult to be used by a modem CRM system. CUSTOMER DATA INTEGRATION As depicted in Figure 1. there are numerous opportunities for customer contact or customer touch-points. At each such encounter with the customer some data of current or future use is exchanged. Unfortunately, that data may end up residing in

various unstructured formats or. in the worst case, it may never be captured. It is impossible to successfully achieve high-quality Customer Relationship Management without fully integrating all the data received through each interaction with the customer into a cohesive whole (23). Results of a study by Nemati et al. (24) revealed that organizations that assimilate data from all customer touch-points to support their CRM initiative achieve considerably higher benefits, user satisfaction, and retum on investment than those that do not. According to one estimate, 20 to 40 percent of most CftM projects involve integration between new and existing data systems (4).

FIGURE 1 Customer Touch-points

Corporate Records, Files, and Databases (Structured and Unstructured)

A Jupiter Communication study reported that customers who purchase using multiple channels as opposed to those using single-channel spend up to 30% more. In that study it wss also concluded that 76% of retailers are unable lo track their customers across channels (3). These retailers are failing to identify their most profitable customers. To be part ofthe Intemet era of 90s. most major companies adopted CRM technology in some form. However, according to a study performed by the Forrester Research (11). about 40% of the companies that implemented CRM did so without giving any consideration to the issue of scattered customer data. Only two percent of the companies in that survey indicated that they do have a single view of a customer across various channels of contact. The problem with most companies was that they invested heavily in developing a system for the front-end design of sleek and catchy Web sites. However, not much attention was paid to how these systems would integrate with other back-end corporate data: the data that was processed and stored in disparate systems - legacy systems and corporate databases. Thus, there was no way of having a single view of all the data, ln the wake of the intense competition to attract and retain customers, if has become an operational necessity to achieve integration that facilitates real-time information flow and provides a single view of data which is current, consistent, and complete across the entire organization (35). Among the major steps that can be followed in order to implement a successful CRM initiative are: 1) Corporate Vision: The top management must have a customer-centric focus - a willingness to put extraordinary efforts to provide the greatest value to their customers. Without such a vision and focus. CRM will not succeed. 2) Global View: The management must critically analyze the existing databases, applications, and means of customer contact. They must determine what part of data is in structured format and whal part is not. 3) Build the Customer View: Find means of building a complete view of the customer from various data sources, both from within and beyond the corporate boundary that includes any data stored inside the business in the corporate databases and data available through third-party, public data sources. To provide a complete view ofthe customer, it is necessary to effectively integrate data stored in various data sources inside and outside the corporate boundary. Web services ofler an emerging approach that can be used to effectively integrate business applications and data stored in various data sources within and across the organizational boundary. This paper investigates the use of Web services for this kind of integration. TTie motivation for this research stems from the need to explore some ofthe technical issues related to integration, one of which is the integration role of Web services, as recently suggested by Nemati et al. (24). In exploring the use of Web services for integration to support CRM initiatives, we first present an introduction to Web services. It is followed by a discussion regarding the pros and cons of using the Web services approach. Then we detail how XML and Web services can be used as a conduit for data integration across existing and new applications. These applications should be used not only for data integration within a business but also for business-to-business integration. Next we discuss the benefits that are likely to accrue by the use of Web services for integration. Finally, we present the summary and conclusion of this research. 99

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WEB SERVICES: WHAT ARE WEB SERVICES? Web services are loosely coupled software components that interact with other software components using standards-based Internet technologies (Figure 2). It is a distributed computing mode! that provides a platform-, communication-, component model-, programming language-, and vendor-neutral interface between applications, mitigating the complexity and reducing the total time and cost required for integrating applications across heterogeneous platforms and technologies (21, 27, 34. 39). Compared with the distributed computing models such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). Java Remote Method Invocation (RMl), and Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), Web services is a more powerful mode! because of its simple architecture, interoperability support, and firewall friendliness (40. 41). Further, as Web services are loosely coupled, there is minimal or no dependency between integrated software components. This permits addition of a new software component or modification of an integrated software component (application) without requiring major changes to the interfaces, thus avoids any detrimental affect on other software components (28). Gottschalk et al. (12) provide a definition of Web services from the perspective of its effect on application integration - "a language and environment neutral programming model that wil! accelerate app!ication integration inside and outside the enterprise." Web services provide a simpler approach to application development and universal interoperability between applications (25. 27). It allows an application to be accessed by other applications from remote machines via the Internet/Intranet using a standardized set of protocols. This is achieved without downloading and installing any code from the remote machine (9). Type of service that a Web service may provide include some form of computation functionality (e.g.. calculating amount due), data access from a data repository (e.g.. product information), or integration of applications (e.g.. applications integration across value chain). The Web services framework consists of three parts communication protocols, service descriptions, and service discovery. 'Hic three major technologies that are required at the minimum to implement Web services include the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Universal Description. Discovery and Integration (UDDI). and Web Services Description Language (WSDL). A brief discussion about each of these three standards is provided below. SOAP provides a means of communication between a Web service. Web services client applications, and UDDI registry. It is an XML-based protocol for messaging and remote procedure calls, which uses existing transport protocols such the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HFIP) and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). SOAP defines a common standard that enables communication between applications across heterogeneous platforms without the use of custom binaries, runtime libraries, or other platformspecific information (10. 15). LDDI standard provides a standards-based approach for publishing, discovering, and managing Web services in a UDDI registry. In addition to the description of published Weh services, the UDDI registry also contains information regarding registered businesses. These entries are organized and categorized by taxonomies to facilitate discovery of services using a variety of search criteria. This enables service consumers to discover and invoke the Web services that arc published in the UDDI registry. An UDDI registry may be private, affiliated, or public (26). Private UDDI
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registries are for publishing Web services that can be discovered by an organization's internal app!ications. Affi!iated UDDI registries are for publishing services that can be discovered and accessed by internal applications and authorized business partners" applications. And. public UDD! registries are similar to ye!low pages in which companies can publish Web services that can be discovered by any application. Each entry in an UDDi registry points to a WSDL file. WSDL provides a means for describing a Web service using a XML-based format. It is a standardized interface definition language that is used to describe what a Web service can do. where it resides, and how it can be invoked. A WSDL flic associated with a Web service contains important details about the Web-service interface for clientservice interaction, such as the name, location and functionality of the service, the network protocol requirement, definition of input parameters, and type of response that will be generated by the Web service. As shown in Figure 2. a Web services client can be an app!ication running on any type of computer, mobile device, or an Intemet appliance. Clients discover the Web service by browsing the UDDI registry by sending XML messages embedded in SOAP protocol envelope. After discovering tbe Web service, the client interacts with it by sending and receiving SOAP messages. SOAP messages transmitted across the network are encapsulated within HTTP packets. USING WEB SERVICES: PROS AND CONS Web services technology is re!atively new; and. just like any other technology offers several advantages when applied appropriately. Some of the pros and cons of using the Web services vis-a-vis other integration technologies for application and data integration are discussed below.
Pros

Interoperability - Web services use a standardized set of protocols and technologies making it virtually platform independent {31). There is an industry-wide commitment to adopt Web services as a common cross-platform integration infrastructure. This makes it possible to develop and deploy Web services that can be invoked by applications developed using different technologies and running on heterogeneous platforms without developing and maintaining multiple customized interfaces, which lowers the integration complexity, cost, and time. Loose Coupling and Vendor Neutrality - The use of proprietary technologies for integration tends to create a "lock-in" situation that may benefit the technology vendor but denies the possibility of easy integration of components offered by two distinct vendors (21). For example. DCOM requires interacting machines to use Windows operating systems while CORBA requires each interacting machine to use compatible Object Request Broker (ORB) product (32, 40). Unlike DCOM and CORBA, Web services do not require use of vendor and/or platform specific components (27, 41). Therefore when DCOM or CORBA is used, there may be a need to develop and maintain multiple middleware interfaces to allow interoperability between heterogeneous applications. Adoption of loosely coupled integration model permits Web services to easily connect an application and data source to any target application with little or no interdependence between integrated
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components (15), On Demand Internal Applications Integration - Unlike other integration approaches, use of Web services docs not require development of multiple customized interfaces to

integrate an existing or new application with other heterogeneous internal applications. 'I"his enhances the ease and speed of internal integration, making it easier to share information internally within an organization.

FIGURE 2 Web Services Architecture

Web Service Provider Publish Service

Web Server

Server-based Application SOAP WSDL Definition

Points to WSDL file UDDI Registry SOAP Request and Response

Personal or other computer Mobile Device Internet Appliance Service Discovery (XML/SOAP)

Web Services Client

Reduction of Functionality Duplication - Web services make it possible to efficiently and cost-etTectivcly expose business rules and functionalities embedded within existing legacy applications to other applications developed using heterogeneous technologies and operating on different platforms. This precludes the need to develop new applications that implement legacy applications" functionalities for the purpose of sharing them with other applications, which reduces functionality duplication. Competitive Advantage - An organization and its business partners can achieve agility to react quickly to changes in a business scenario through deep integration of its internal business applications with business partners' applications and data sources. Such integration provides dynamic interconnection of business processes and real-time view of data across the value chain making it possible to support enhanced customer relationships. Web services make it possible to efficiently and cost-cfleetively achieve such integration across the value chain. Use of Web services also Fall 200S

makes il possible to cost-effectively integrate small-sized business partners' applications and data sources with those of other value-chain members. In addition, new business partners' applications can be easily integrated with the value-chain members" applications via existing Web services intertace(s). Such integration capabilities can render competitive advantage to all value-chain members. Easier Maintenance - Web services provide a single standards-based interface that can be used to integrate an application with other heterogeneous applications. This reduces maintenance cost and time significantly as it is only necessary to maintain a single interface. However when component models such as DCOM and CORBA are used, it may be necessary to develop and maintain multiple customized interfaces to support integration with heterogeneous internal and business partners' applications increasing the time required for integration iind the maintenance cost.

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Cons Slower Operation and Increased Processing Requirement Web services operations can be slower by a factor of 10 to 100 compared to competing distributed computing technologies such as DCOM and CORBAyilOP that use binary encoding (2). Factor that mainly contributes to this negative performance is the augmented processing requirement of XML-based messages (30). This results in added processing load on servers and mobile devices. requiring more powerful servers and resulting in a shorter battery life for mobile devices. Increased Bandwidth Requirement XML-based messaging is used in Web services. XML is self descriptive, which causes XML-cncoded messages to be larger in size. Larger sized XML-based messages require approximately 30 to 50 times more bandwidth for transmission across networks and impose significantly more processing overhead on switching and routing devices than binary-encoded messages (13. 19). Increased bandwidth usage and processing overhead have negative implications in both wired and wireless networks. However, this negative effect is more pronounced in wireless networks due to the bandwidth restrictions in wireless networks and slower transmission speeds supported by wireless devices such as cellular phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Complex to Implement - Web services used to integrate heterogeneous data sources and applications across the value chain may need to support both standard application programming interfaces (APIs) and integrated interfaces for performance monitoring, manageability, auditability. replication, and reliability (2). As interacting ^plications and Web services across the value chain are not under the control of a single If group, it is essential to implement dynamically configurable Web services that are capable of detecting and adapting to the changes in the interacting components and/or service-level agreement across the value chain. Io implement Web services with these capabilities is complex. Security and Reliability - Basic SOAP does not provide the security required for electronic business transactions between business partners. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) may be used for security in Web services. However. SSL is not particularly useful when messages have to traverse multiple connections, and most message exchanges between business partners' applications require messages to travel over multiple connections (7). Use of SSL also degrades Web services' performance in terms of processing and bandwidth requirements (18). Further. SOAP/HTTP does not provide reliable message delivery necessary for many business transactions (17). Reliable HTTP (H'lTPR) could be used for reliability, however due to the multihop scenario in typical business interactions it is more appropriate to define reliability at the SOAP level (7). Finally, no mechanism has been defined to allow business partners to select quality of service (QoS) in their message delivery that can predict end-to-end latencies, response times, and throughputs. These are critical issues that have to be resolved to achieve widespread adoption of Web services. Web services primarily operate in a stateless manner Stateless interactions support relatively simple requestresponse interactions as each new request-response interaction is independent of the past interactions. This is Fall 2005

an important issue when Web services are used for supporting a long-running business transaction requiring multiple request-response interactions between applications. Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) facilitates the management and maintenance of message-oriented state information (27). Thus, use of BPEL may be necessary to orchestrate and synchronize Web services that are used for supporting stateful longrunning transactions between applications. Issues of Semantic Mismatch ~ The basic problem of semantic mismatch is not automatically resolved when Web services are used. Thus, it is necessary to ensure that data elements are correctly interpreted and matched when internal or external integration projects are undertaken. This is imperative for successful integration as diflercnt internal departments and external business partners may have used different data-structures and names for the same data. As public Web services can be used by any client, it is essential to unequivocally state service-level agreements and clearly define data elements required for proper functional interaction.

APPLICATION INTEGRATION THROUGH WEB SERVICES In a typical organization numerous business applications exist. These applications may have been developed over time using different models and technologies. This is common in business organizations as different technologies and component models are better suited for different types of applications and platforms. Often these applications are not integrated because of high integration costs and complexities, which results in creation of data silos. For example, customer data collected by the accounting department and stored in the accounting system may not be shared with the marketing depeirtment because the marketing system is not integrated with the accounting system. Maintaining interoperability between the new and existing applications developed using heterogeneous technologies and operating on different platforms can tum out to be complex and expensive in terms of time and cost. One ofthe strategies that an organization can use to circumvent interoperability problems is to reuse functionalities of existing applications. This will preclude the need for developing new applications, thus reducing the number of different applications that need to be integrated. Further, this will also enhance reliability and maintainability of applications due to reduction in functional redundancies. Web services offer efficient and cost-effective integration of disparate business applications and data sources within and across organizations, allowing intemal departments and business partners to share business functionalities and data (38). Its use does not require developing and maintaining multiple customized interfaces, which simplifies applications integration significantly. Results of a survey by Gartner. Inc. revealed that Web services are now being used in more than half of the applications integration projects (5). Although, the Web services approach is being used for both intemal and business-tobusiness integration projects, currently it is more oflen used for intemal integration projects (1). One ofthe main reasons why companies are cautious in extending Web services applications beyond the firewall is the lack of development in security standards for Web services (38). Few companies such as Fidelity Investments. Wells Fargo & Co.. and Dollar Rent-A-Car are using Web services across the firewall (8. 33). Most common examples of application integration via Web services falls into following categories: (1) busincss-to-business integration. (2) integration with legacy applications, and (3) 102

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automation of intemal applications. BusinesS'to-Business (B2B) Integration a business application available to its business partners has been a dream of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Supply Chain Management. These kinds of applications are much easier to develop using Web services. For example, a business wants its partners to be able to view and update orders

in its database. The business can expose the database as a Web service and clients can develop their own applications based on Web-services description provided by the Web-services designer (Figure 3). As depicted in Figures 4 and 5. a Windows-based client application can access information liom the database on a remote server of a business partner. The business partner provides a service description and the client develops the application to suit its business needs.

FIGURE 3 Architecture of a Web Service for B2B Integration

Web App

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FIGURE 4 Getting Order Information from Business Partner's Database

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FIGURE 5 Submitting Order Information

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Legacy Integration Most existing businesses have legacy applications and data, and they want to continue to use them while migrating to a new type of applications that utilize the Internet, e-commerce, and other new technologies. However, rewriting legacy applications running on traditional infrastructure so that they can connect to the new functionality is usually expensive and time-consuming. Instead, connecting these legacy applications saves the time and expense, and it provides a mechanism for tying together several IT platforms.

Most traditional solutions use a combination of rewriting legacy code to run on more modem systems or installing "middleware" applications to connect together disparate systems (Figure 6). However, rewriting legacy systems could amount to redevelopment of the system. This could tum out to be prohibitively expensive and error prone. Since each client application requires customized code to access the legacy application, any modification in the interface would require modifying each client application. Therefore, in this type of legacy application integration, an XML-based Web services solution would be more appropriate.

FIGURE 6
Traditional Approach to Integration

Legacy Application Legacy data

Customized interoperability Code

Client Application

A Web service based approach for legacy integration requires a Web service adapter (Figure 7). An adapter is needed for each service, and it can be either developed or in some cases it may be provided by the original developer of the service application. There is no requirement to develop a customized solution for each client-server connection; instead the adapter can serve any client ^plications suitable for interacting with a Web service. The adapter is typically an application program that connects to the server, like a Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), CiCS TS Extemal Call Fall 2005

Interface (ECI) or if the server uses the CICS TS transaction system, or DCOM interface. In an example application, the authors developed a simple Visual C#.NET application that can take a fixed-length text file (Figure 8) used by a legacy application and apply mapping infomiation (an XML file) to convert the data text file stored on a server to an XML file (Figure 9). Once the data is in XML format, it can be used either by other client applications or presented on the Web easily. 104

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FIGURE 7 Web Service-based Approach to Integration

Client Application Client Application

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Legacy Application Legacy data

Web Service

FIGURE 8 Fixed-width Text File

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IMPACT OF WEB SERVICES ON TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP Achieving greater efficieneies and lowering total costs have always been important issues, especially when businesses are faced with a challenging, economic climate like that of today. Increasingly, most financial and IT managers are focusing on total cost of ownership (TCO) to allocate IT expenses in order to achieve business goals. The Gartner group's defmition of TCO, which is widely accepted throughout the industry, states that TCO consists ofthe costs incurred throughout the lifecycle of an asset, including acquisition, deployment, operation, support, and retirement (36). Instead of looking only at the initial investment, TCO considers all the costs over the life of an asset, such as a server, hardware and software upgrades, maintenance, personnel training, and software development. When comparing a number of investment alternatives, it turns out that initial acquisition costs are not a good indicator of the cumulative TCO over the investment lifecycle. The true long-term cost may actually

Allowing access to the corporate data to a company's employees could become a daunting task, especially, if the data should be accessible at anytime and from anywbere. Of course, a simple solution is to make the data available through the Web site, however, the data available on the Web site is human viewable but cannot be manipulated by an application as may be needed by a customer service person. Additionally, sometimes a company might want that the data be available to field staff remotely through various hand-held devices (Figure 10). In such situations, use of Web services can greatly simplify the process of integration. As an example, if the data resides on a database server, through a Web service it can be presented on the Web or made accessible to a Microsoft Office client (like Excel). The interactions for receiving required data from corporate database server to Excel client application are shown in Figures 11 and 12.

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exceed its initial purchase price by many times, or an asset with a eomparatively higher acquisition price may tum out to be the best value over time. So one of the advantages of 'total cost of application ownership' {TCA) approach is that management would tend to have an application-centric view instead of hardware-system-centric view. Therefore, the issues such as application deployment, user location, and network access

options, all become important issues in decision making (37). As it became obvious with the long lived COBOL ^plications and Y2K problem, that applications tend to outlive the hardware and infrastructure that they were built on. so if there is a way to allow user access to the original applications built on now outdated infrastructure from the modem devices, it will reduce TCA. Web services do ofFer such an altemative in manv cases.

FIGURE 9 An Equivalent Converted XML File

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Among the benefits of Web services cited earlier include business process automation, enterprise application integration (EAI), and business-to-business (B2B) integration. Additional benefits include options to choose the best technology platform suitable for the situation at hand and location and device independence. An additional advantage of Web services is that it helps leverage existing legacy applications. All of these reasons help reduce TCA. According to IBM (14), its customers who adopted Web services were able to reap following benefits: reduced time to launch new applications, enhanced productivity Fall 200S

through the use of Web. increased efficiency, and reduced costs and increased revenue. For example, an integration project at Merrill Lynch that was estimated to cost $800,000 was successfully completed well under budget for $30,000 by using Web services as the integration technology (38). During a recent survey by Accenture {!), a group of executives were asked what benefits their company might expect to see from the adoption of Web services applications. The top responses to the question were as follows: improved efficiency/speed of processes (46 percent), cost reduction (41
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percent), improved customer service (25 percent), improved connectivity (20 percent), and better integration of systems (20 percent). As can be seen from this set of responses, the adoption

of Web serviees can reduce TCA eonsiderably sinee all of the above reasons contribute to cost reduction over the whole application life-cycle.

FIGURE I I Running the Macro (VBA Code) to call a Web Service to get Data from a Remote Database Server

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SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING REMARKS There is no doubt that successful corporations of today and the future must use the Intemet technologv to its utmost potential to enhance customer relationships. One of the most significant hurdles in achieving this has been lack of complete customer view across all the channels of customer contact or touch points. Data sharing and applications integration within organization and between value-chain partners have also been an issue. What is required on the part of management is the total commitment to provide the best customer experience, and to manage the complete customer and partner relationship throughout the lifecycle. In order to achieve this goal management must follow a strategy of first analyzing how the various data resources and applications can be tied together so that they can provide a complete and accurate customer view to all individuals involved in managing customer or partner relationships. The best tools available to integrate various systems entail XML-based Web services. This paper provided an overview of data integration issues in CRM and discussed an effective solution using Web services that would make the vision of highly effective CRM a reality. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Sun Microsystems are developing fast Web services standards to alleviate some of the shortcomings of current Web services implementations such as the need for higher bandwidth and processing requirements. Fast Web services standard proposed by Sun Microsystems use efficient binary encoding instead of XML-based encoding. Initial test results have shown that the size of the Fast-encoded SOAP envelope used in fast Web services is almost one-fifth the size ofthe XMl.-encoded SOAP envelope (30). This reduction in the size ofthe SOAP envelope reduces the bandwidth and processing requirements for Fastencoded SOAP envelopes. These performance benefits are particularly important when there is a need for near real-time data transfers, and/or need for efficient processing and bandwidth use due to processing and bandwidth restrictions. The last two issues are especially relevant when customers and salespeople use wireless devices like PDAs to interact with Web services. Standards organizations and software vendors are continuing their unified effort for enhancing Web services in the areas of security (e.g.. WS-Security. WS-Encryption). routing, reliability, and interoperability (27). The promise of universal interoperability and r ^ i d application integration offered by Web services will be ftilfilled only if major software vendors provide equivalent, or at least compatible, implementations of Webservices technologies (25). Although. Microsoft. Sun Microsystems, IBM, Oracle and other software vendors have integrated in their products support for developing Web serviees, complete interoperability between Web services deployed using different vendor platforms is not yet a reality. However, with an industry-wide push toward achieving Web services interoperability, efforts of Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) to ensure interoperability between Web services implementations, and release of revised SOAP. UDDI. and WSDL standards. Web services interoperability is expected to soon become true (20). The universal interoperability achievable through the use of Web-services technologies will provide a tremendous boost to the original intent of the Web as a free. open, and completely standard environment. Through its use, organizations will be able to rapidly encapsulate and expose the business processes embedded within existing applications to other intemal and extemal applications. This will make rapid assembly of applications to support business processes using standardized Fall 2005

open source technologies a reality. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors gratefully thank the reviewers for their excellent suggestions and comments. REEERENCES 1. Accenture. ''Web Services: IT Efficiency Today...Powerful Business Solutions Tomorrow." 2003. http://www. accenture.com/webserviccs. Arsanjani. A., B. Hailpem. J. Martin, and P. Tan. "Web Services-Promises and Compromises," Queue, March 2003. pp. 48-58. Axciom. "Customer Recognition: Using Customer Data Integration to Optimize Every Customer Interaction." 2002. www.acxiom.com. Caisse. K.B, "Integration: The CRM Sales Hook." CRMDaily.com, August 6. 2002. http://www.crmdaily. com/perl/story/18898.html. Cantara, M. "Web Services-Reality Behind the Hype," Gartner, Inc. Presentation, July 23. 2003. http:// www.wipro.com/connect/we.pdf Canter. R.J. "Successful CRM Hinges on Data Quality," April 30. 2002. http://www.destinationcrm.com/ articles/default.asp?articleid=2177. Curbera, F,. M. Duftler. R. Khalaf. W. Nagy. N. Mukhi. and S, Weerawarana. "Unraveling the Web Services Web." IEEE Internet Computing, March-April 2002. pp. 86-93. Caulficld. B. "What the Heck are Web Services?" Business 2.0,3:4. 2002, p. 106. Fletcher, P. and M. Waterhouse. Web Services Business Strategies and Architectures. Birmingham, UK.: Expert. 2002. Fremantle. P.. S. Weerawarana, and R. Khalaf "Enterprise Services." Communications ofthe ACM, 45:10. 2002. pp. 77.82. Gormley. J.. S. Dolberg. S. Cole. H. Chun, and J. GatotT. "The Demise of CRM," Forrester Research, 1999. http ://www. forrester. com/ER/Research/Report/Summary/O, 1338.7473,FF.html. Gottschalk. K., S. Graham. H. Kreger. and J. Sncll. "Introduction to Web Services Architecture." IBM Systems Journal, 41:2, 2002, pp. 170-177. Greenfield, D. "Web Services' Minority Report," Network Magazine, January 2005. pp. 30-43. Hailstone, R. and R. Perry. "IBM and the Strategic Potential of Web Services: Assessing the Customer Experience." 2002. www.idc.com. Joshi. P., H. Singh, and A.D. Phippen. "Web Services: Measuring Practitioner Attitude," Internet Research, 14:5. 2004, pp. 366-371. Kaneshige. T. "CRM^s Evolution." Line 56, July 31, 2002. http://www.line56.coni/articles/default.asp?anicleid=3888. Kleijnen. S. and S. Raju. "An Open Web Services Architecture." Queue, 1:1, 2003. pp. 38-46. Kobielus, J. "Web Services Work. But Will They Scale?" Business Communications Review, 33:4. 2003. pp. 40-46. Kobielus. J. "Wrestling XML Down to Size: Reducing the Burden on Networks and Servers," Business Communications Review, 34:12. 2004. pp. 35-38. Kvitka, C. "Giving Legs to Web Services." Oracle, September/October 2004. pp. 59-60. Lee. J. and M.S. Park. "Integration and Composition of Web Service-based Business Processes." Journal of 108

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