Over the past 25 years, companies have tried to achieve this by investing in enterprise software applications that capture, analyse, and disseminate critical customer information. However, most of the critical data is stored in disparate enterprise software applications, which were designed to automate individual, discrete business tasks, but are not optimised for executing complete, end-to-end customer-facing processes.
More recently, the architectural approach has moved towards integrating standalone CRM systems with other enterprise information systems to try and deliver a true 360-degree view of the customer and supporting processes.
Whether this is termed as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Customer Data Integration (CDI), or another integration methodology, through the increasing adoption of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), the end goal is to create "composite" applications that interconnect and unify disparate customer information found in siloed enterprise applications.
