Reference Architectures — These are a series of articles that describe “best practices” in terms of designing and implementing loyalty and related technology. Many of these articles are essentially for “geeks only,” but the genesis for all of them are the marketing and other strategies they are designed to support.

Approximately two dozen architectures will be described, each in terms of their "maturity levels," starting from the basic (or non-existent) implementation, up to what I refer to as the "nirvana state," the best reasonable implementation that can be imagined given current technology.

The first best practice, on what many might consider the boring and archaic function of batch processing has been completed. Work is taking place on application security and the administrative application.