Database Reference
In-Depth Information
plane at the gate—it amounts to thousands of dollars lost per minute. In this
scenario, a call comes in from the bridge to the customer support team who has
to scramble to resolve whatever the problem could be. Of course, that plane is
like a customer—it has a profile, a past, and so on. Time is money—in this case,
airport fees, waiting fees, customer satisfaction, and other costs mount while
the clock is ticking, and it's all adding up. One large airplane manufacturer
IBM worked with had information locked away in separate systems, making it
nearly impossible for support teams to access all of their knowledge reposito-
ries, each with a different security schema (data was in SAP, FileNet, Content
Manager, Siebel, file shares, and more). Using Data Explorer, this large airplane
manufacturer was able to build a single point of access to all of their reposito-
ries with seamless and more granular security controls on the data. A common
back-end infrastructure was used to service multiple front-end applications for
data retrieval. The support teams got such an injection of productivity from
being able to “zoom in” and “zoom out” on the scope of the problem at hand,
that the number of personnel that were needed to support an aircraft decreased.
This allowed the client to realize better revenue yields as new planes could be
staffed with existing teams, as opposed to hiring new staff for new plane deliv-
eries. In the end, they were able to reduce help-desk resolution latencies by
70 percent, which ultimately resulted in multimillion dollars in savings and
downstream customer satisfaction, all with Data Explorer.
Indexing Data from Multiple Sources
with InfoSphere Data Explorer
Data Explorer is a search platform that can index data from multiple data
sources, and that provides a single search interface, giving users the ability to
see all of the relevant data in their organization and beyond. Although Data
Explorer handles the indexing and searching, the data itself remains in the
original data sources. (This
ship function to data
paradigm is one of the prin-
ciples behind Hadoop as well.) Figure 7-1 shows the architectural layout of
the main components of Data Explorer.
Connector Framework
When developing your search strategy, you first determine which data sources
you need to access. Data Explorer makes this easy by including a Connector
Framework that supports over 30 commonly used data sources, including
