Back in the not-so-long-ago, when Internet-driven capital still flowed and new applications sprouted like dandelions on the corporate lawn, it took uncom-mon vision to pursue integration as a core business strategy. Many companies put new ERP, CRM and other software and systems in place to feed their growth and solve their immediate business problems, but few had either the time or the inclination to put much thought into how they would all work together in the future.

Sure, CIOs invested in tools that helped one application peek at the data in another. Lots of IT executives cobbled together systems and made business happen one way or another. But precious few could say they were integrated, with a big-picture view of their companies, customers and corporate collaborators.

That was then. Now, as you will see in this, our 15th annual CIO-100 issue, CIOs and their executive suite colleagues are treating integration as a business imperative?not as one possible strategy among others but as the only possible strategy. Today, integration is not a choice?it’s an obligation.

One Company, One Customer View

That’s certainly the case at MetLife, the $32.5 billion financial services conglomerate that was under pressure to generate and demonstrate payback on all of its many recent acquisitions. The mandate to create a single customer view?so that a call center representative could see a consumer’s retirement account, and health and auto insurance policies?came directly from Chairman and CEO Robert H. Benmosche. "With big companies like MetLife, you often don’t get treated as a single customer of the organization," explains Tony Candito, CIO of MetLife’s individual business unit. By next year, they will. (See "Economies of Scale," Page 46.)

At MetLife, executives don’t see integration as just one project or one process. Rather, it’s the backbone of the business, the core strategy. That high-level view is consistent throughout the list of CIO-100 honorees.

In "Strategic Alignment" (Page 56), companies such as Staples and Dow Chemical pledge allegiance to long-term integration goals. Staples, for example, has integrated all its sales channels so that a shopper can visit a kiosk in aisle A, see what’s available both in store and online, pay for it there and pick it up or have it delivered. And there’s a reason to afford customers all those options: revenue. "Our most profitable customers are those who use the full range of the way we do business," says Staples CIO Paul Gaffney.

Taking the Lead

Dow, famous for its early-adopter ERP implementation close to a decade ago, has used that experience as the foundation for almost all its IT investments and as the technology enabler for its growth strategy. Dow’s decision to commit to SAP’s R/2 as an ERP standard bore fruit when it took only one year to integrate its ERP applications with Union Carbide’s after their 1999 merger.