Once your management team has formulated a data management strategy—say it wants to improve the ways in which the company targets and contacts prospects—it’s time to consider the technology options available to integrate all the customer data so that sales and marketing will be going after the most appropriate customers. You can go the enterprise vendor route, or have your CRM systems hosted by an on-demand vendor like Salesforce.com. Or you can integrate existing customer-data systems by building a service- oriented architecture or structure using the Web to knit together all the customer information contained within a company’s business applications. UnumProvident’s Dolmovich decided to go the Web services route. He chose IBM’s WebSphere Customer Center product to pull together the pockets of customer data on account activity, payments and premiums.

Dolmovich says the first data loaded into the CDI hub in late 2005 came from business customers (companies or employers that bought or sponsored UnumProvident’s disability products) and brokers (the independent businesspeople who sell them). With the new system, Dolmovich says, "We are now able to assimilate and display a broker’s entire block of business and create some statistics and a profile of our relationship with that broker." UnumProvident is now working to create individual profiles of employer customers so that every time a new customer account is created or accessed—perhaps to change an address or add new customer information—all employees of the insurance company, regardless of what system they are using, will see that change at the same time.

The New, New Hype
Whenever a new CRM solution emerges, it’s inevitably followed by hype, complexity and confusion. CDI is no different, says Colin White, founder of consultancy BI Research. One challenge for companies embarking on a master data management strategy is getting all parties to agree on common definitions and labels for categorizing customer data. Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide is currently in the process of sunsetting its legacy mainframe system in order to move to an SOA environment. The aim, says Song Park, Starwood’s director of pricing and availability technologies, is to allow for more real-time and online reservation capabilities and transactions for its 900 hotels in 80 countries. But a major pain point for the groups working on the SOA migration has been hammering out the data labels and definitions for the Web services that will be consistent across the SOA implementation. How, for example, one group defines a specific hotel’s property identification label can vary from PID, to pID, to property ID, to name just a few of the possibilities, Park says. "How do you synchronize [those labels]? Who owns that data? Who’s mapping those things?" Park asks.