"The definition of a customer can differ quite significantly depending on what department of a company you talk to. It may be something completely different to the logistics department than it is for the sales department," says Thomas Norberg, CIO of Ice.net, formerly known as Nordisk Mobiltelefon in Sweden.

Norberg realized that building systems to enable a unified view of customer data was a critical need. But not so long ago, he and his team would have been out of luck. Building what customer relationship management (CRM) vendors like to call the "360-degree view of the customer" used to be a painstaking process that generally revolved around monolithic products from a single vendor.

What's changed? Ice.net's transformation relied on a number of widely applicable trends and breakthroughs that include the rise of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the use of shared-information data models. Companies are also learning that the keys to developing a flexible and unified CRM system include mapping IT to business processes and bringing IT and line-of-business organizations closer.

It's All About the Data

Ice.net had only been providing service for a few months when Norberg joined in early 2007, but its IT infrastructure was already incapable of supporting the young company's growth. "Even companies with no legacy systems can wind up with data in silos," says Gartner analyst and Vice President Ted Friedman. As a result, "they get the opposite of the 360-degree customer view."

SOA, when empowered with strong data management practices, can enable that 360-degree view since it can breach the walls separating data with reusable services. But Friedman adds that "we see a lot of SOA projects and investments being made without a lot of thought about data. Ask the average [IT] guy what SOA is about and he'll talk about business process and componentizing applications."

Norberg would agree. "The key is to realize that [a modern IT architecture should be] all about informationâ¬and how it relates to other information."

Step one in developing a data-oriented approach to the customer is finding a common language. In the last few years, various industries have developed shared information data models, or SIDs, that give exact definitions of categories such as customers or suppliers. Ice.net drew on the work of the TM Forum, which represents companies in telecom, cable, media and the Internet.