News Feature

Four Winning Companies Achieve Single View of Customers

By Lafe Low

February 15, 2004 — CIO — Where there is a successful and efficient integration strategy, there is enterprise value. A well-executed integration initiative can provide a singular lens into the business and the customer, speed time to market, consolidate systems and processes, and save time and, ultimately, costs. At its very essence, integration generates value.

Four of this year’s CIO Enterprise Value Award winners have done exemplary work developing systems that drive their integration initiatives while creating value for their organizations. Their efforts to integrate systems and business processes have generated results because they were influenced by both business objectives and technological realities. The winning organizations come from different industries at dramatically different levels of scale?including

global cosumer packaged-goods manufacturer Procter & Gamble, computer manufacturer Dell, travel technology provider Worldspan and Academic Management Services (AMS), a 500-employee academic loan purveyor.

In creating its winning system, P&G took on the huge task of cataloging its thousands of technical standards to expedite R&D. Dell developed an internal sales tool that provides its agents with more complete product information to help close sales. Worldspan consolidated databases for more efficient delivery of its services. And, finally, AMS condensed the Web-based views of several loan systems into a single interface, thereby empowering its loan officers to present customers with more comprehensive options and even helping the company enter a new line of business.

Despite the differences in the winners’ sizes and industries, when pursuing an integration strategy that would generate value, these CIOs and their respective business sponsors shared similar goals, followed similar approaches and enjoyed similar outcomes. Here we present the four companies that have mastered the art of integration with their Enterprise Value Award-winning systems.

A Singular View on Value

For most companies, achieving a single view of the customer is the ultimate goal of their integration struggles. A single view translates to significant value through the time and expense saved by not having to cross-reference or maintain multiple databases and by being able to respond to customer inquiries in a timely manner. "Many companies have pockets of information relative to their customers," explains AMS CIO John Mariano. "The more that’s integrated and the more business intelligence you can gain from that, the more you are able to deliver value across the company."

That was certainly the case for Worldspan. The company’s 2,700 employees provide technology services for travel agencies worldwide. Worldspan used to maintain more than 50 databases for salesmen, customers and equipment inventories. The company’s LINK system has enabled it to aggregate those databases into one, which helps salesmen address the precise needs of their customers at the time of a transaction. "We could never keep the databases in sync," says CIO Sue Powers, who is also senior vice president for the company’s Worldwide Product Solutions division. "The customer often had the impression that we didn’t know what we were doing, and in many cases, they were right." When a travel agent was opening or moving to a new location, often something would be unworkable on opening day, whether it be phone connections, software or hardware.