Week 9: Synchronization

The article discusses about two cases, 3M and Rewiring Thomson Financial. In the case of 3M the fragmentation was very awful as sales representative of each division need to collect all the information from customer by calling them individually and then store all that information in its own database. As a result it was impossible for the company to retrieve the profit from an individual customer. Each business units had to maintain and update its customer database separately which increases the expense of the company. The same situation arose when the company moved online. In fact 40% of the customers address was invalid. Thus the company decided to build its own database and spend $20 million to create a global data warehouse. By synchronizing and collecting all the data in the single data warehouse the company can redesign, reaggregate, and reconfigure its offerings to better fulfill the needs of groups of customers or to capitalize on market opportunities. Thus it can be said that if the company has a strong organizational culture it can overcome any single issue.

On the other hand, the case of Thomson Financial followed the customer scenario model discussed but in a slightly different way. The company segmented its customers into three groups which are portfolio managers, equity analysts, and traders. The company then studied each segment in details and based on the result of this study, it directed packaged products to the appropriate segment. Thomson Financial traditionally offers its customer a fragment set of product controlled by the isolated business unit. To solve this problem they created a set of tailored offering individual customer segmentation. In addition, organizations need to organize themselves to meet how their customers think about them and their products.

Thus from the article it can be said that synchronization can lead a major issue for the organization, so to resolve the issue organization should adopt a strategy which overcome all the issues. To make your organization more responsive and efficient you need to break down the walls between your units, rather than manage the information.

Week 8: Customer Data Integration

Organizations fail to achieve ROI from the CRM investments as the organization have no faith on their customers and organization struggle to integrate new channels and point of interaction with marketing sales and service functions. The failure to create a consolidated view of the customer relationship affects basic project objectives, such as a real-time, closed-loop process bridging analytical,
operational and collaborative CRM functions. Data integration plays a vital role at the time of development of CRM system; many CRM systems fail due to inadequate data management and integration capabilities. To resolve the customer related issues organizations will adopt CDI (customer data integration) technologies to resolve data primacy and accuracy issues related to system record of customers.


Solving CRM data integration requires standardization and interoperability. There are many barriers to achieve success for CRM data integration that includes department-centric applications containing master data such as cross-functional information as individual units maintain separate customer lists for local business processing. Customer master files affect CRM implementation, delay in goal, traditional integration method which add more complexity as new organization requires some system change, interface modifications and data quality diagnostics. Some organizations might solve customer data quality issue by using enterprise architecture techniques and approaches. The organization facing such data integrity problems should adopt CDI (customer data integration) solutions to resolve the issue; earlier adoption of solution will help the organization to gain success in business.

The CDI market consists of processes and technologies for recognizing customer at any touchpoint. There are three categories within the CDI technology market:
1) Infrastructure platform packages
2) Third-party providers
3) Service bureaus and data brokers

CDI delivers the required infrastructure to consolidate and augment transactions into a single customer view. These solutions include foundational components to create a panoramic view of a customer to leverage across CRM functions. CDI also supports collaborative and operational CRM.

CDI helps the organization in synchronizing the data achieving closed-loop CRM processing by sharing customer intelligence across the three primary CRM domains that is analytical, collaborative and operational. Merging CDI solutions with downstream data warehousing helps the organization to integrate a closed-loop CRM business intelligence environment.

Thus to conclude a well-structured CDI strategy has a set of planning, implementation, and ongoing operational requirements that align with the overall CRM strategy.

Week 7 Knowledge Management

The case study presented by David Finnegan applies a processual analysis (Pettigrew, 1997) to the implementation of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system from a knowledge management perspective to a contemporary situation within IBM. In the articel it describes about the specific areas neglected in previous CRM studies - sub-cultures, psychological contracts, how tacit knowledge is surfaced and transferred, and with what effects on implementation. It investigates how the system stakeholders and the system itself evolved through encountering barriers, sharing knowledge, finding new uses, inventing work-arounds. The following are some of the issues:

1. End-user involvement.
2.Support from the management and its side-effect.
4. political issue on sharing knowledge.
3.Development schedule (part of resource issues)
5.Data quality and migration issues.
6User training.
7.Data mining and Integration.
8.Lack of customer clear-vision.

The above issues are very similar to the Data warehousing issues. It is said by many authors that around 60% to 80% of the CRM project fails due to strategic issues. In the case, IBM is a company very experience in IT development, and has enough resource and specialist to overcome most technical problems. However, they still encoutner the issues mentioned above and struggle introducing CRM to the organizationi.