2007 TechNO Expo

Today’s business climate is more dynamic and challenging than ever before. Competition is at an all time high and intensifying, as players in the global market accelerate the pace of innovation and change while also extending their reach. Demand for energy, raw materials, and labor is pushing costs to peaks in some areas, and the trend is likely to continue in the foreseeable future. To survive and thrive in this environment, firms must intimately understand their customers and markets, accelerate innovation, respond quickly, and drive out costs while improving value. Today, more than ever before, business leaders are turning to their IT partners for assistance in all these areas.

Globalization and diversification help large companies sustain double-digit growth rates, but add significant additional operating complexity as lines of business are added and the global footprint expands. However, global or even regional customers that buy products and services from a company’s multiple business units expect a consistent and seamless relationship—what can be called a one-company view. The right IT investments can help create this seamless customer experience while providing the tools needed to maintain unique business unit and regional requirements.

It’s also important to develop comprehensive views of the companies you serve. Then your customer representatives and management can use existing relationships to achieve greater penetration and act on opportunities for growth and improved service. The key to creating this one-company view of the customer is gathering, organizing, and sharing customer information across business lines. This includes information such as customer-company structure and operating locations, all relationships with your business, and detailed history of all product and service transactions.

The IT challenge in many global multi-division firms is that customer profiles, sales and service transactional data, and any insightful ancillary information about customers’ operations is typically locked-up in an individual division or country computer systems.

Creating a one-company view requires translating and consolidating data from all the individual systems and then maintaining that data on an on-going basis. Implementing one common computer system for all divisions and countries is rarely a practical option.

Often, IT must provide a system that overlays the various source systems and extracts all key data, scrubs and translates it, and stores it in enterprise data warehouses. This approach also requires that a governance process be established to maintain data standards for enterprise information so that future evolutions don’t corrupt the one-company view.

Once the enterprise customer data is collected, the second major challenge is how the information should be disseminated. Often the solution includes new internal and external Web-based portals and messaging techniques that can be used to quickly capture and deliver the information in a total enterprise fashion around a customer. For example, using a mobile device in the field, a technician in one division can generate a critical alert message that is then automatically sent to other customer support staff in different divisions that serve the same customer.

Non-technical IT issues are also important, such as organizing and presenting the information in a way that provides true insight in an easily digestible manner. To accomplish this, IT professionals must understand what the data represents from a business standpoint, and how to organize information so it aligns with the business roles and processes. As companies focus on creating the one-company view, IT operations will increasingly play a role in molding the way in which the company interacts with and supports customers.