Amdocs Clarify Dashboard Tutorial
How does the user of the Amdocs Clarify CRM system derive real-time situation analysis – business intelligence for Clarify – in easy-to-use dashboard views of the Clarify data? One simple answer is Dovetail Software’s RuleManager – a drop-in replacement for the Amdocs Rulemanager product – as detailed in the following example.
We’ve been discussing business intelligence for the last few days, the need to integrate data, and the need to present business users with very simple tools. In the background, Dovetail’s own Gary Sherman has written an extensive tutorial showing precisely how to: write business rules to reflect real situations; query the Clarify database for current situations; export the retrieved data as XML; and display them in color-coded graphics in the form of dashboard gauges.
The result is an attractive graphic display, understandable at a glance, showing real-time business intelligence – in this case support progress in a contact center, using the Clarify database with Dovetail’s enhancing tools and replacement applications.
Gary Sherman’s dashboard tutorial on SLA Monitoring addresses the very real need of a support or contact center to keep track of its service level agreements, SLAs. As we’ve pointed out before, business intelligence interfaces need to be simple:
“As companies try to use performance management and business intelligence technologies, the one thing they realize is that they have to make these things brain-dead simple” – Princeton Review educates itself in business performance management
“give users what they want: Sophisticated applications in an easy-to-understand wrapper” – Business intelligence: The next frontier
What the article really brings home is how easy it becomes to extend and customize software once it jumps out of locked-in proprietary code and into open standards. This has always been a fundamental benefit of Dovetail CRM, breaking the Amdocs lock-in and restoring a future development path to the legacy Clarify install.
“Through all of its evolution, Dovetail Software’s family of CRM products has embraced open standards in the process of bringing extensibility to Clarify’s proprietary code. Open-standard scripting languages such as JavaScript simplify and energize extension and integration throughout the enterprise computing environment. These languages are readily recognized by many applications, and freely employed by in-house IT departments.” – CRM Thrives on Open Standards
Gary Sherman’s tutorial shows how, having operated in the open-standard JavaScript language to retrieve the crucial data from the Clarify database, the use of Dovetail SDK, on the .NET platform, makes it a simple matter to output the data in open-standard XML.
And from here, the global network comes to the aid, with a simple third-party tool written in Flash, and designed todisplay XML in graphical format, in this case as attention-getting gauges.
In the future, when another display device comes along, or a different business view of data is required, the development work shown in Gary Sherman’s dashboard tutorial can remain unchanged while the open standards enable extensions in currently unforeseen ways. And as he points out, his solution is scalable from the beginning.
