Bringing it all together

THE MINNESOTA DEPARTMENT of Vehicle Services (DVS) had a big customer-satisfaction problem on its hands. For years, the lack of front-to-back systems integration resulted in drivers waiting two weeks to renew a license and as long as a month to get a car title, frustrating even the most patient Midwesterner.

In came Judith Franklin, tapped 18 months ago to modernize the aging system. "I said, 'Let's take this to the Web,' " explains Franklin, manager of enterprise support at DVS, in St. Paul, Minn. "Then I learned what I was dealing with."

What she faced was a customer-service environment that was pure paper, lacking electronic attachments to data and applications on the back end.

Driving records for the entire state were -- and still are -- hosted on a closed IBM mainframe database, which could not accommodate online transactions and was accessible only to staffers in DVS headquarters. Drivers' paperwork was routed to St. Paul via fax or mail and entered manually into the mainframe.

This lack of integration is extreme, but may sound familiar to frustrated enterprises. CRM integration can be messy IT business: Heaps of ever-changing customer data inhabit myriad places, from the multiplicity of CRM applications themselves to ERP implementations, back-office databases, and legacy systems. For CRM to do its job well, information from all of these systems should work in tandem rather than at odds with each other.

At Minnesota DVS, the CRM integration problem couldn't be ignored, but tossing 35 years of legacy development out the window wasn't an immediate option. Franklin decided to leverage Web-to-host vendor WRQ's Verastream product to integrate the mainframe database with the DVS' statewide network of systems. In-house developers built a set of business models and Web-based applications to draw information directly from the database. Now DVS transactions are electronic and customer data is exchanged in real time.

Self-service applications are also on the horizon, and Franklin eventually plans to transition DVS to a services model, in which numerous more-accessible databases will serve a single front end. "But that's not something we could do in six months," she chuckles.

Integration looms large

According to several recent analyst reports, users who invested big bucks in the past few years on lengthy CRM deployments are frustrated with poor results, in large part because the systems exist in silos. Your CRM system clearly is not working if, for example, customers sign up for a new credit card, then receive an offer for the very same credit card a month later because the marketing system isn't hooked into billing.

"Basically, the [CRM] application has generally been in place first and the integration comes after the fact," says Michele Rosen, program manager at IDC in Framingham, Mass. "So you put in Siebel, set it up, then you find you have customer information in Siebel and SAP that is different. It's so hard to sync up."

Getting a grip on all this data will be essential for exploiting existing systems for quick ROI and aspiring to what industry experts consider CRM's Holy Grail: the single view of the customer throughout the entire business.