That process eliminates both the hefty labor cost of having employees rekey data and the inherent opportunity to introduce errors. Dowds says that 98 percent to 99 percent of Web-originated traffic requires no support from a Vanguard employee. "It’s just a very cheap way to do business," he says. "Whenever we add new functions and features, it’s a guiding principle in our design approach that it has to go straight through. It’s just the way we do things now."

Reusing the middle tier of standard business objects initially developed for the Web makes maintaining channel parity easier and less expensive. Since all channels use the same objects, Buckley’s team can add a new feature or make a change once in an object, and that change will be reflected across all channels. Although Vanguard’s interactive voice response system can’t make use of the Web user interface, it too will eventually be tied in to the standard business objects.

One Big Database

The introduction of transaction capability on Vanguard.com also marked the beginning of the company’s push toward an enterprise database. Since a plethora of systems and databases had sprung up to support Vanguard’s different lines of business, a single customer’s data might have been stored in 10 different spots. That data was often defined differently from one database to the next, necessitating a lot of what Buckley calls "non-value-added reconciliation" between databases.

The effort to eliminate disparate databases is expensive and not always visible, Buckley says. It was well worth the hassle though, he adds, since the existing tangle of databases was expensive to keep consistent and accurate. So as the IT team expanded Vanguard.com, it also created a comprehensive customer database that would be the single repository of all Vanguard’s customer data.

Identifying consistent definitions for some 4,000 data points wasn’t easy. After all, the businesspeople who built those disparate systems think about customers differently. Still, Dowds doesn’t regret the hours spent hammering out a consensus. As a result of all that wrangling, Vanguard is in the process of retiring 12 databases, which makes for more consistent, seamless and faster service for clients and employees alike.

The single database has cut response time for Web-based clients in half, Dowds says. Employees’ response time has been slashed by 60 percent to 70 percent. The task of updating and maintaining databases is also exponentially easier. With fewer systems and databases to administer, Vanguard has been able to trim its roughly 800-person IT staff by about 75 through attrition. "Four to five years out, we will have less software to support and less data to support," says Dowds. "The fact that we have to manage this data once—rather than 10 times—that’s an annuity for life. A little painful to get there, but...."