Why integration will make or break your CRM plans

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With the ability to create actionable business rules like these, marketing teams will be able to roll out tactical plans for how the organisation will meet customer needs and demands while providing a consistent experience across various lines of business and marketing channels. In tandem, the IT team can leverage the new infrastructure to ensure it delivers the policies' requirements. With the customer interaction policies, business rules and supporting infrastructure clearly defined and deployed, any CRM initiative, whether a prototype or a full-scale rollout, has a far greater chance of success. Ultimately, executing a customer interaction policy relies on the IT infrastructure and the ability to create a common view of key enterprise definitions across the enterprise. To summarise, making a CRM investment work is a two-step process that begins with unifying disparate systems by creating and managing standardized, reusable business definitions mapped to the different CRM system schemas throughout the organisation. These maps, which direct CRM data movement across systems, are accessible to third-party tools via SOAP and Java APIs that make it possible to map common CRM, customer and business definitions across transactional and legacy systems. Having accomplished the definition phase, enterprises can then deploy "interaction policies," which use the common language of metadata to allow disparate systems to coordinate with each other in real time. The end result is that cross-sell and up-sell opportunities are presented in real time; customers have pleasing, consistent relationships with the enterprise, no matter what channel they use; and the organisation as a whole functions more efficiently and cost-effectively. This is the future of CRM: whoever builds this framework can rightfully claim credit for laying its foundation. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Barry Briggs is chief technology officer and vice president of engineering at Wheelhouse Corp., a developer of CRM integration software. Earlier in his career, he was the chief architect and lead developer of Lotus 1-2-3^TM.

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