Organizations that focus on individual consumers often to struggle to identify their customers at the most basic level - their name. There are many reasons for this:

• Capture-dependent: spelling mistakes
• Customer-dependent: name changes
• Application-dependent: packing multiple fields into a single field
• Architecture-dependent: conflicting names for the same person across systems
  

These different types of issues then become increasingly difficult to address in a complex organization such as a retail bank or telco where dozens to hundreds of systems may hold customer records.

Collectively, Customer Data Integration (CDI) means doing all these things well and helps address what was a cause of failure on many Customer Relationship Management (CRM) implementations. Vendors such as IBM, Syperion, Initiate and Oracle offer CDI-specific Solutions and the market is undergoing rapid growth.

Over the last few years there have been significant benefits to addressing these issues through better governance, data quality improvement programmes and upgrades to new applications that were more sophisticated in their capability to store customer data.

This involves fixing historical issues and minimizing the chance of errors occurring in the future.

One of the challenges that globalization brings is around name recognition. Techniques that have been applied over the past few years simply do not work as well with many Eastern European, North African, Middle Eastern and Asian names. The phonetic translations that convert Arabic names into a Western form are typically inconsistent.

Living in London, I see the Retail Banking sector facing perhaps the greatest complexity worldwide. Rapidly changing demographics require new techniques and technologies to solve this name recognition issue. Once again, big vendors are moving into this space through acquisition – with IBM offering a specific product – GNR – to meet the globalization name challenge.

It took about 25 years for the ARPA initiative to evolve into the web and about 10 years before the advent of techniques and technologies arose that make up web 2.0. Although it’s a bit early, we’ll probably start to see the momentum around web 3.0 before the end of the decade. Web 2.0 was a bottom-up movement and Enterprise 2.0 is about making use of these capabilities. We may see Enterprise 3.0 connect with Web 3.0 earlier and even help drive the need for new technologies. Besides the typical “vice drivers”, what would drive demand for Enterprise 3.0 from the business side?

• Fixing healthcare – an avalanche of costs is breaking current systems, whether in the countries like the US or in those applying more socialized models.
• Enabling virtual shoring – organizations will want to improve their use of offshoring, outsourcing and physically separated staff. “Virtual shoring” in virtual worlds can help provide the answer through better collaboration and greatly reduced travel costs.
• Bank of the Future – firms and individuals will continue to strive for new ways to raise capital, manage liquidity and hedge risk. Retail consumers will want a richer and interactive experience provided that simplifies their lives through use of technology, not a branch. Institutions will want a richer technology experience too – as well as the ability to bring in information from all types of sources in the decisioning process.

On the supply side, the fundamental change will be open source, globalization and technology exponentiation factors.

In areas such as health care, we’ll see these factors work together. A virtual treatment room may be a way to reduce cost by providing access to. Increasingly individuals don’t have pensions and they will look to have innovative product options that make long term health care affordable.2 technology areas look to stand out that will support these new models:

• User Interactivity – the current interface needs a major upgrade. Visualization will become much, much richer and collaboration easier.
• Information Development – information currency will continue to get more valuable. This will be driven by more systems and types content, greater abstraction levels and that increasingly decisions will be made in an automated fashion independent of human intervention.

So what might if look like? Think of an enhanced version of Second Life combined with everything Google is doing on steroids. Second Life for individuals to act in new virtual communities for commerce, healthcare and education; Google to link it back to the real world. If this sounds far off, its not. Look at what organizations such as IBM, Dell and ABN Amro are doing in the virtual world. Some of its very early (and some would argue PR oriented) but its happening.