The Multichannel Retailing Reference ArchitectureThis is a minor update to the architecture after the comments on the original posting. I've now added the 'Decision Support' component.
This component should contain the enterprise-wide reporting and Business Intelligence (BI) tooling not encompassed in any of the other components, such as the CRM. Ideally all reporting and BI should be performed using this component, though the reality is that many application packages will provide their own specialist reporting tools that may be better suited to the job at hand. These tools may be best placed for operational reporting, whereas the tools within Decision Support will be for non-operational reporting, such as data mining historic information and trend analysis.
The challenge here will be deciding what should be considered as operational and non-operational data. One possible approach could be as follows.
Partition the 'Master Data' in to two areas; Operational and Historic. The Operational Data Store (ODS) may enforce a policy of containing only 13-months of data, whilst the Historic Data Store (HDS) may contain all older data. Of course, each entity in the ODS may have data of varying age due to legislation and compliance issues, much as data in the HDS will also be governed by such factors. From a cost perspective the HDS may go further and implement Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) techniques to store the data, e.g. 1-3yrs online, 3-7yrs automated/retrievable offline, 7+yrs offline/offsite.
The tools providing reporting on the HDS are always likely to be generic, it's more cost-effective than having secondary instances of each of the business applications for specialist reporting on the historic data. However, this is where there will always be the challenge of the business user requiring the same level of reporting they have on their operational data. Though this frustration can usually be circumvented by demonstrating the data mining and flexibility of the BI tools. The only time it may be necessary to provide secondary instance of a business application against the HDS is for legislative compliance. A recent example I have experienced was to ensure a despatch system could reproduce all labelling for any customer orders shipped internationally for a period upto 7 years. To achieve this, we had a secondary instance of the application configured against the HDS that would only be started upon business request (e.g. during an audit) and agreed with the application vendor that this would not constitute the need for an additional software licence. A cost-effective solution, satisfying both the business stakeholders and our IT budget!
