Take a peek behind the I.T. curtain at most large companies and you’ll see scores of different systems and technologies that for years sat isolated from one another, or at best, were connected in point-to-point fashion.

Today’s IT executive is now tasked with having to make all these disparate systems work together because competitive pressures and the e-business environment demand it. And custom hardwiring one app to another?with all the time, money and lack of flexibility that approach entails?is not going to get you there.

That’s why you need a holistic integration strategy, a big-picture view that doesn’t focus on the trees, meandering from project to project, but gives you the 40,000-foot view from the skies. Piloting that strategy are the business drivers in your company?things such as speed, getting closer to your customers and collaborating with partners. Because an integration strategy that doesn’t march in lockstep to your business strategy is a bit like imbibing too much at your high school reunion?it’s going to come back to haunt you.

Read on to learn how CIO-100 honorees Staples, Wells Fargo, Dow Chemical and Dell Computer manage their strategies not just one application at a time, but how they attack integration as an end-to-end process, from supplier to customer. (See also "Five Points on the Integration Road," Page 60, to learn about best strategy practices; and "Integration On-Ramps," Page 64, which discusses technologies companies use to do the work.)

Staples Kiosks Connect Customers and Merchandise

Customer service drives Paul Gaffney’s commitment to integration. And profits show that commitment matters.

"Our most profitable customers are those who use the full range of the way we do business," says Gaffney, the CIO at Staples in Framingham, Mass. He adds that customers "want to get a very consistent and seamless experience. When you do the right thing for your best customers, good things happen."

The CIO of the office-supplies giant stresses that for those good things to happen, it’s essential to have an overarching strategy that uses IT to advance the company’s mission. Gaffney adds that "trying to be more holistic in our outlook is one of the things that separates great IT organizations from the rest of the pack."

One of the products of Gaffney’s enterprisewide focus on the customer is the online kiosk?dubbed Access Point?that is installed in all of the company’s 1,040 U.S. stores. Creating the kiosks required connecting the company’s e-commerce website, Staples.com, with its point-of-sale (POS) system, order management system, distribution system and supply chain. On the people front, staffers from the retail, catalog, online, finance, distribution, merchandising and training areas?practically everyone but the cafeteria chefs?collaborated. For example, the kiosks offer customers the option of buying, say, an office chair at the kiosk using a credit card, then taking a bar-code printed receipt up front to the register to pay in real-time. Customers can also use the kiosks to access a library of information about products and services, view an inventory of 45,000 online products, and build PCs to order (eliminating the need for more than 35 percent of stores to carry computers). "We’re letting customers do business the way they want to do business, not the way we want them to," says Gaffney.