Customer Types

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mporter_ak
Posts: 1
Joined: 18 Sep 2013, 18:19

Hi - I'm chewing my teeth on the tool and meta model, and have a few questions:

1) How would you account for different Customer Types with the Meta Model?

Our organization is a Telco and we often have different products, applications and processes depending on the Customer Type (i.e. Residential, Business, Wireless)

For example, a customer may sign up for a Wireless Account and a local line. The processes involve creating new accounts and provisioning service, but this would occur in different systems and have slightly different processes. They would have two Customer Accounts, one of each type.

2) What is the best way to capture and report on Data Integrations?

For example, New Account information would be entered into our CRM, and information would flow through to our Billing system and various Provisioning systems depending on the products selected. We would like to capture and report on the Integration Points, the underlying technology, the data entities, trigger and product type at a minimum.

Any advice would be helpful.

Mark P
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Customers are defined as the consumers of Products. We actually use the Actor or the Business Role class to define them. In this way, an Actor (individual or group) can be a customer even of things like ‘internal’ services as well as playing other roles.

In the case that you describe, I think we’d use the Business Role to define things like “Residential Customer”, “Business Wireless Customer” etc. and then we can relate those to our products etc. This also means that when we come to capture the actual customers, a customer could play multiple roles (e.g. a residential and a business wireless customer).

Integration solutions such as Data Integrations are captured as Application Providers. They are providing the behaviour of moving (and maybe transforming) information from one or more systems to another (or many others!). We then use the same approach as for any other application in terms of capturing and understanding the underlying technology platform, the information and data that is operated on etc.

In terms of capturing which systems are being ‘integrated’ by these integration solutions, we use the Static Application Architecture / Application Dependency models to show how the integration solution depends on the source systems for information (and we can capture that information on the arrows of the graphical model) and the target system depends on the integration solution (again, we can define the information that is being sent to the target on the arcs of the diagram).

We’ve recently been working on some very powerful views that can trace data lineage across systems using this approach.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
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