Bringing it all together

THE MINNESOTA DEPARTMENT of Vehicle Services (DVS) had a big customer-satisfaction problem on its hands. For years, the lack of front-to-back systems integration resulted in drivers waiting two weeks to renew a license and as long as a month to get a car title, frustrating even the most patient Midwesterner.

In came Judith Franklin, tapped 18 months ago to modernize the aging system. “I said, ‘Let’s take this to the Web,’ ” explains Franklin, manager of enterprise support at DVS, in St. Paul, Minn. “Then I learned what I was dealing with.”

What she faced was a customer-service environment that was pure paper, lacking electronic attachments to data and applications on the back end.

Driving records for the entire state were — and still are — hosted on a closed IBM mainframe database, which could not accommodate online transactions and was accessible only to staffers in DVS headquarters. Drivers’ paperwork was routed to St. Paul via fax or mail and entered manually into the mainframe.

This lack of integration is extreme, but may sound familiar to frustrated enterprises. CRM integration can be messy IT business: Heaps of ever-changing customer data inhabit myriad places, from the multiplicity of CRM applications themselves to ERP implementations, back-office databases, and legacy systems. For CRM to do its job well, information from all of these systems should work in tandem rather than at odds with each other.

At Minnesota DVS, the CRM integration problem couldn’t be ignored, but tossing 35 years of legacy development out the window wasn’t an immediate option. Franklin decided to leverage Web-to-host vendor WRQ’s Verastream product to integrate the mainframe database with the DVS’ statewide network of systems. In-house developers built a set of business models and Web-based applications to draw information directly from the database. Now DVS transactions are electronic and customer data is exchanged in real time.

Self-service applications are also on the horizon, and Franklin eventually plans to transition DVS to a services model, in which numerous more-accessible databases will serve a single front end. “But that’s not something we could do in six months,” she chuckles.

Integration looms large

According to several recent analyst reports, users who invested big bucks in the past few years on lengthy CRM deployments are frustrated with poor results, in large part because the systems exist in silos. Your CRM system clearly is not working if, for example, customers sign up for a new credit card, then receive an offer for the very same credit card a month later because the marketing system isn’t hooked into billing.

“Basically, the [CRM] application has generally been in place first and the integration comes after the fact,” says Michele Rosen, program manager at IDC in Framingham, Mass. “So you put in Siebel, set it up, then you find you have customer information in Siebel and SAP that is different. It’s so hard to sync up.”

Getting a grip on all this data will be essential for exploiting existing systems for quick ROI and aspiring to what industry experts consider CRM’s Holy Grail: the single view of the customer throughout the entire business.

Challenges abound. For one, most large companies sport five to 10 CRM applications. Secondly, these systems are diverse, including call centers and customer service centers, self-service Web apps, SFA, and customer-oriented analytics for e-marketing, cross-selling, and up-selling campaigns.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, these systems all house their own data sets and definitions. Settling on a system of record, then cleansing all the data across applications to adhere to one set of definitions can consume a great deal of effort.

In 1999 Shell Oil Products in London mounted a massive data integration initiative as it meshed its loose confederation of 120 operating companies as part of its quest to present a united, global front to customers. The company used an in-house solution, Kalido, that has since been spun off into a separate software company.

Kalido acts as an intermediary layer between the back-end systems and a single interface, mapping customer data from the company’s innumerable ERP systems into a central data model. The solution requires no manual coding and leaves the original data unchanged, according to Shell officials.

“With Kalido, it has been much easier to introduce change to our data models [post-integration],” says Jim Smitheman, management information officer at Shell.

“Our data models keep track of all these attributes for our customers, like the market sector they operate in,” Smitheman explains. “We can cut and dice the data to discover, for example, why certain oil lubricants are more successful in this country over another.”

Finding a solution

Approaches to CRM integration vary from using EAI or messaging middleware in order to bridge best-of-breed applications, to one-stop-shopping for every piece of enterprise software, an approach advocated by vendors such as Oracle. Data warehousing is also in the mix, as is Web services, which have the potential to ease many integration headaches by using standard interfaces.

Putnam Lovell NBF, a San Francisco-based investment bank, is leveraging Grand Central’s Web services network to integrate Putnam’s Salesforce.com CRM service with an equities research and distribution system, says Rodric O’Connor, Putnam’s CTO. Putnam’s staff keep records of which client would be interested in specific research notes in the CRM system, which is linked with distribution via Grand Central. SOAP messages tell the distribution system when to e-mail research notes to clients based on the CRM system’s data.

“We have no servers behind our firewall,” O’Connor explains. “This is all like a virtual integration. It was actually very quick for us to set up,” about one-third the usual time thanks to the SOAP-based interface, he says.

#016YaYa, an online “advergaming” company, has made CRM integration a cornerstone of its revenue model. The Los Angeles company creates interactive online games to collect data for clients; one project for Chrysler engages potential automobile buyers with a series of online games tailored to certain customer demographics. During the course of the game, the consumer provides information that is extracted in real time and funneled directly into Chrysler’s own CRM system, giving the automaker detailed data to use when targeting future campaigns.

The enabling technology, called CDT (Consumer Dialog Technology), was designed for YaYa by Deloitte & Touche and uses middleware vendor Iona’s Web services-based integration platform at its core.

“We think this is the missing piece of the CRM puzzle, using real time and enabling integration to build a persistent relationship with the customer,” says James Clarke, COO of YaYa. This type of integration platform steps up the value proposition of CRM by giving users like Chrysler data in the moment, which they can turn around and leverage to try to make a sale.

Heeding the call from users for better CRM integration, CRM giant Siebel Systems in April unveiled plans for its UAN (Universal Application Network). This architecture is designed to take a standards-based, vendor-independent approach to the development of application-independent business processes that can be executed by various integration servers. The architecture would allow businesses to rapidly deploy prepackaged businesses processes but also modify processes on the fly with reduced need for customization, according to company officials. Siebel expects to roll UAN out this fall.

“The technical approach is to leverage the capabilities of the integration server vendors … in conjunction with an approach of having a common data representation between applications that exist in the integration server platform,” says Ed Abbo, senior vice president of technology at San Mateo, Calif.-based Siebel. “If you are adding another application to the application network, the job is simply to transform the data from that new application to the common data representation.”

UAN is designed to allow organizations to deploy applications incrementally while leveraging existing applications in the infrastructure, Abbo adds.

“Siebel is trying to make its upgrades easier by working around standard XML, so if the source system changes, the specific business functions don’t have to be changed,” says Bernard Drost, vice president of technology at Akibia Consulting, a Westborough, Mass.-based company that specializes in CRM projects. Essentially, UAN cuts down on repeated manual coding for integration, he says.

As more and more ERP companies enter the CRM arena, some enterprises opt to tap SAP, PeopleSoft, or Oracle for customer-facing solutions to avoid the oftentimes lengthy and costly integration of CRM with back-end systems. Molex, a Chicago-based electronic interconnection device manufacturer, estimated it would cost $1.5 million in integration costs alone to put together a best-of-breed CRM solution for marketing fulfillment, pipeline management, and customer care, says Barry McGoldrick, Molex’s director of global application development.

Instead the company, which runs a single instance of SAP worldwide, made ease of integration a deciding factor and turned to SAP for its CRM module, even though the best-of-breed option offered equal functionality, McGoldrick says. Other companies are opting for Web-based CRM models such as those from UpShot and Salesforce.com and leveraging Web services to ease some of the heavy overhead typically associated with integrating CRM behind a company firewall.

Frustrated users are realizing that integration holds the key to unlocking CRM’s true potential to boost customer service and satisfaction, deliver more sophisticated sales offers, and cut enterprise costs. But the journey remains arduous, as the economy puts the brakes on IT spending and the options and approaches for solving the CRM integration problem are varied and complex. Some observers see hope in current vendor efforts, such as Siebel’s UAN, and in the push for Web services, which are at least signs that the problem is being addressed.

“[CRM] integration is complex and difficult, and I think Web services will be another solid way to begin to move the problem toward a solution,” notes Tyler McDaniel, integration analyst at Hurwitz Group in Framingham, Mass.

Source: www.infoworld.com