Just some notes, off the top of my head...
ICON
As an ODS it contains every item of information I am currently looking for. I can envisage Skills Based Reporting, First Call Resolution Reporting, Agent to Customer granular Reporting (OB), Customer to Agent granular Reporting (IB), etc. etc. etc....
With the right application and aggregation of data consolidation between the various Tables, it could be quite straightforwards to extract what you need and to create a Data Mart. It seems as though it would be easy to reference unique identifiers between the Table structure and "see" the end-to-end contructs of a customers call. (That is, assuming you have GVP - which we do not(!))
With regard to deployment, I'm still thinking about how to do this... We have both Network and Premise TServers, MCR IServers and OC Servers - the (unique identifier) data flow between them is usually disparate, at the best of times - I've yet to try to converge Network with Premise data from ICON however, with a ParentConnID, etc. that should not prove to be too difficult...
The addition of custom data seems a little sticky; to have to update an .xml file with your requirements (by plotting what is essentially KVP's) and then referencing them from within the individual ICON Application(s) in CME seems a curious way to apply changes.
INFOMART
The fun begins...!
ETL for Infomart is good. It does what it says on the tin - and quickly, apparently.
I'm not sure what the thought process was to break out multiple versions of the aggregate data from what is essentially the same data source... Consider; the Agent Aggregate "View" (which does not contain customer interaction information) a Customer Aggregate "View" (which does not contain Agent information), an Interaction Aggregate "View" (which contains bits and pieces...) I'm sure the developers meant well when creating these Aggregate Views but I have found it frustrating that an item of data (such as a custom item of data) resides in one "View" but not in another.
Moving away from the Aggregated "Views", you [i]can [/i] access the unaggregated data in a much more raw form. I understand the rationale for exposing data at this level better than I do the "Views" - but not as well as I can see, feel and understand the data structure provided in ICON ODS(!)
Yes, there is more to come in this space; apparently we could be looking at a secondary data consolidation, at Infomart level, to provide us with yet another Layer (Presentation) which can be "more easily understood and referenced by various Business Reporting Tools". At the same time, we'll be provided with a Reporting Interface...
My primary concern now is; do we build our own "Views", Presentation and Reporting Layers to enable us to move forwards? On the understanding that these items/layers will not be supported by Genesys... Or do we wait and see what the Genesys offering is going to be? Obviously, whatever Genesys provide will no doubt be version controlled and future-proof, whereas anything we build in the interim will be "out of sync" with later Schemas of both ICON and Infomart - unless you extract what you need and place it in an easily referenced Schema of your own (and hope that the data Fields you have included don't change too much...!)
I'd welcome any comments to this, also...
Tony
