Business Value of Data Warehousing (Unfied Custome View)

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Financial services giant ING Group has been getting kudos from industry observers for developing a unified IT architecture that more effectively pulls customer data from multiple accounts. The company’s construction of multiterabyte database “hubs” for its seven U.S. business units has resulted in a comprehensive, unified view of customer activity. Thomas Hoffman and Lucas Mearian report on the success of this enormous project in the September 27 issue of Computerworld.

The data integration effort began in July 2001 with the goal of creating a reusable architecture that would both drive down costs and mitigate risks. Chief Technology Officer Raymond Karrenbauer tells the journal, “The hubs are for centrally structured data ... enterprise value data that’s commonly used across all lines of business, [including] customer information, agreement information and product information.”

In May 2003, the company began to implement its integrated data environment. According to Computerworld, the structured data resides in a set of partitioned IBM DB2 Universal Database EEE databases.

The project relies on data-mapping software from Informatica Corp. that lets ING cross-reference customer information among databases at business units. Data profiling software from Evoke Software Corp. is used, along with ad hoc reporting and analytical tools from Business Objects SA. The result is an object-based database infrastructure that blends unstructured and structured data from 2,000 databases into one logical view of customer and operational information.

The journal reports that ING created DB2 repositories to aggregate a subset of structured data from each business unit’s database that may be relevant to other business units. The system funnels source data through a hub where a series of transformation and de-duplication steps is conducted. A separate repository stores unstructured data. Karrenbauer explains that an architectural layer sits above this, which uses metadata to determine common traits between structured and unstructured data.

While some data is transferred in batch mode, ING is also piloting real-time, bidirectional data updates between the databases. As part of the data integration process, ING centralized some of the source data from existing databases and classified it with common terminology so information could be shared across business units, Karrenbauer tells Computerworld.

He notes that each information hub has hardware costs of between $2 million and $4 million, but he adds that several projects have resulted in an internal rate of return of more than 100 percent by avoiding project delivery duplication. Karrenbauer explains that ING’s standardized project delivery model can be repeated as each business unit pursues its own relational databases.

Other ING divisions in Brazil, Chile, Canada, and the Netherlands will be able to apply the information-hub approach adopted by ING Americas as a template for their own data integration efforts. Karrenbauer tells the journal that he estimates they should be able to reuse 50 to 65 percent of the IT architecture created by his division.

ING’s Chief knowledge officer Linda Marr tells Computerworld that the unified IT architecture is already paying off. She cites recently enacted antispam regulation requiring financial services companies to provide customers with an e-mail opt-out option. Marr explains that ING is about to comply with the regulation because it has all of its customer information accessible from a single environment.