DTS/NV: Concepts

A case for the back office

Night Vision is an application framework for developing client-side back office applications for systems running the DTS/S1 'Pitch Black' object database. Back office application clients are an absolute requirement of every business that profits directly from online transaction processing. The reasons are outlined below.

Analysis and reporting

When transacting financially with an online user, a business becomes liable for all its monetary operations and is liable to report on any and all of its operations to its jurisdictional governing bodies for periods of up to several years. Apart from these and other legal constraints, a business's key interest is fully understanding and profiling all of its customer interactions for the purposes of marketing, improving sales and optimising the business model in general. A business that considers only the cash ins and outs and is agnostic of client transactions at a more granular level will never evolve its sales and marketing strategies and will ultimately miss out on the benefits that understanding the needs of its customers can yield. Back office applications cover the areas of transaction analysis, reporting and understanding all business-customer interaction (e.g. sales) trends. Some back office applications have the capacity to analyse transactions pertaining to specific users, related user groups as well as internal entities, such as stock and inventory. A good implementation will enable an analyst to, say, compare the seasonal demand of several products or, perhaps, break down the sales of a product by the customers' age demographic.

Financial operations

Clearance, settlement, reconciliation and cash accounting is another scope for the back office. Transactions between a business and its online customers rarely exist in isolation: there may be numerous electronic payment gateways, clearance houses and escrow funds involved. Businesses engaged in online transaction processing (OLTP) and operating at a global scale may have to commit to several different payment gateways to accept cash from customers, depending on what country the customer may reside in. Then there is a class of financial systems that cater for a bi-directional flow of funds between themselves and the customer. Examples are businesses that offer a wallet feature, such as gaming and wagering operations, a securities exchange and other forms of brokerage where the business may need to not only accept money from a customer in exchange for a service, but also pay money back in form of winnings, stock dividends or sales of securities. Even simpler models, such as online marketplaces may involve elements of bi-directional cash flow, where a business is willing to offer online refunds. Finally, the most important third party that a business will need to reconcile with (predominantly one way) is the tax office. Back office applications play an important role here as can be used to analyse all business transactions for an elapsed period of time to determine the cash position of the business in relation to the third parties that were involved.

Customer support

Call centre operations are at the core of every business that takes money from their customers. Customers will inevitably call in to make account inquiries and will expect to deal with human operators to help solve their problems. Companies will optimise call centre operations by moving some common inquiries, such as changing a password or address details to the front office (the product website), however, there will be a class of problems that can only be resolved by a qualified operator. This list is extensive, but typical entries include technical support and inquiries in relation to their transactions and accounts. The dynamics of call centres are such that not all calls will be inbound. At times, call centre personnel will be required to contact customers in order to follow up on an event that had occurred earlier. Triggers for outbound calls may include failure to clear funds, long-term account inactivity, new product offers and suspicious account activity, to name a few. An operator's administration console is a class of back office applications that enables a call centre operator to answer a customer's query. It allows the operator to quickly locate the right customer and perform the necessary administrative work while conversing with the customer, or schedule work orders for issues too complex to be resolved on the spot. It should allow the operator to locate customers based on some trigger criteria and to contact them, via email or by placing a call.

The functions illustrated below are in the heart of all back office applications. Some businesses rely on certain "facets" of the notional back office triangle more than others, but none of the facets can be overlooked completely.

Back office applications clearly cover a broad range of a company's day-to-day operations. And not just any, but every company that conducts some sort of OLTP operations and has a substantial clientele makes a case for the back office. Every architect knows that purchasing a database license for a new OLTP system is just a small part of the overall commitment: you need to consider the operating platform, the front-end, interfaces between payment providers and the back office. To cast an analogy, the back office is like a car's engine - tucked well out of sight and void of styling cues, yet without it the car won't go anywhere but downhill.

State of the art

Back office suites are a natural extension of database management systems, yet most DBMS vendors are ignoring turnkey back office solutions completely. When we say most, we mean all; Oracle is offering a back office product for retail market customers only, but this is outside of OLTP. One reason for this might be found in the nature of the products, most of which are relational systems. A relational DBMS is agnostic of the notion of business entities because it doesn't store data as whole objects, but as unpacked fields that, despite what the name suggests, are completely unrelated to each other when stored. The relation between fields only emerges when the application issues a query that joins fields to reform the original entities. Because the underlying platform is object agnostic, developing a generic entity-aware back office framework is a complex undertaking. DTS/S1 is a pure object-oriented platform and, as such, is much more aware of what it stores, eliminating the impedance mismatch problem. We saw this as an opportunity: an opportunity to be different.

We have differentiated ourselves from our peers right from the outset of building DTS. From the very beginning, we wanted to build a complete object-oriented transactional platform, not just a means of storing data. 'Platform' implies a foundation - something that can be built upon. With that in mind, DTS/NV 'Night Vision' is a logical extension to the DTS platform that equips the adopting organisation with all the necessary tooling to "see" into their business. Night Vision is not just a stand-alone DBA tool; it is also an application framework that can be extended with pluggable business rules that shape a business's back office. Reporting, transaction analysis and auditing, trends, charting, data mining, customer service and entity management are well within the capacity of DTS/NV.

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