Leveraging Your Legacy Systems In Pursuit of Customer Relationship Management
Introduction
After years of focusing on the implementation of back-office applications, Fortune
1000 organizations now realize the importance of the front office. Front office
applications include sales force automation, call centers, externally-facing
help desks, and customer care. Together they make up what we commonly refer
to as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). To be effective and offer a 360-degree
view of the customer, it is critical that these CRM solutions interface with
the back office applications. In many enterprises, these back-office applications
are located on mainframes and/or AS/400s and consist of proprietary applications,
which are traditionally difficult to integrate — especially in the new
world of the Internet. There exists, however, a category of development tools
that can easily and rapidly tie the new and old worlds together. These tools
are commonly referred to as "legacy extension toolkits." Legacy extension tools
enable an organization to integrate historical data, as well as current data,
from legacy systems with data collected by newer front-office and e-business
solutions. With a 360-degree view of the customer, the enterprise is prepped
to deliver the best service and information to its customers.
Focus On The Front Office
The Internet changes everything. Though used extensively, this statement is
indeed true. No longer are customers content with the traditional ways of conducting
business. They expect service 24 hours-a-day, seven days-a-week; they want immediate
answers. They desire the ability to connect with the enterprise via a variety
of channels — one of them being the Internet. And they want to have the
information received to be uniform from channel to channel. Without it, they
will find other organizations that are willing to meet their demands.
An effective front-office solution must enable an organization to provide information across the entire supply chain — not just between its customers and the enterprise. In the world of the virtual corporation, each "link" in the supply chain is critical in meeting customer needs and requirements. With the effective transfer of information within and outside the enterprise walls, the enterprise can provide its customers with real-time information from anticipated product ship date to account balances. When customers have complete access to the information they need to satisfy their requirements (which in some cases is satisfying their own customers' requirements), the customer relationship is strengthened and the risk of customer flight to the competition is reduced. In today's competitive marketplace, enterprises must ensure that accurate and complete information is available at all times to both the customers and the enterprise employees with whom the customer interacts.
Make New Friends, But Keep the
Old
Like the children's song that recommends that we "make new friends, but keep
the old," Fortune 1000 organizations need to grow their base of "friends" (automated
solutions) but in doing so, retain valuable older ones. Traditional brick-and-mortar
organizations are faced with a major dilemma — throw out their old business
processes and bring on the new or face the potential risk of going out of business.
With billions invested in legacy systems, how does an enterprise justify or
even afford the cost of starting from scratch? With the appropriate tools, Fortune
1000 organizations don't need to. They can leverage their legacy systems, implement
new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and e-business solutions and tie
them all together. Valuable data stored in the legacy systems can be unlocked
and put to use in providing robust, 360-degree views of customers and the organization
to provide a competitive and effective customer-centric business paradigm.
Y2K Or Not
Year 2000 non-compliant legacy systems forced Fortune 1000 organizations throughout
the world to spend billions of dollars in remediation or replacement of non-compliant
hardware and software. Many organizations opted to retain their legacy mainframe
systems versus complete replacement with client/server systems. Aside from the
financial investment enterprises have made, years of application tweaking and
refinement and business process reengineering have optimized these systems to
the point that organizations are reluctant to start anew. Users need not be
trained on new complex systems but can continue working on familiar systems.
By tying these legacy back-office systems to CRM systems, organizations significantly
reduce the cost and time to implement solutions that provide a unified view
of the customer.
Serving Security and Scalability
in the Enterprise
Although there is much in the news about Internet-based applications and their
precursor, client/server-based applications, there is a large percentage of
organizations that have not yet moved to a multi-tiered, open architecture.
In addition to the reasons mentioned above, many organizations are concerned
with issues ranging from scalability and security to cost. Finally, certain
industry sectors have had less robust vertical industry-focused ERP solutions
from which to choose. Thus the majority of enterprises in the financial services,
insurance, education, and government sectors have not embraced client/server
as the platform for their core competency business applications.
These organizations have chosen to remain with mainframe-based proprietary systems (or, in the case of mid-sized corporations, IBM AS/400-based proprietary systems). These organizations typically are concerned with the scalability, security, and reliability of the server farms that have popped up in so many organizations or divisions of the enterprise. By remaining with legacy systems on a mainframe, these organizations are assured that their applications will be available and perform when and as needed. To move to a customer-centric business model, however, these organizations must add a robust CRM solution that they can tie to the back-end legacy system.
Applications with a View
CRM or front-office applications are relatively new to the packaged application
market. The current CRM application's heritage stems from stand alone sales
force automation (SFA) and call center applications. These applications enabled
an organization's employees to access information that would allow them to answer
questions and provide information to customers. They were islands of information
that required manual or batch connectivity to the back end transaction-based
systems. Often, this integration was never completed and various divisions within
the enterprise remained isolated with only a narrowly focused view of business
transactions. Additionally, the data was difficult to share because each system
defined the data differently. Mapping data between the applications was costly
and ever changing. The various front office applications remained isolated and
offered inaccurate views of customers. A consolidation of these various customer-oriented
applications in the past few years has at least integrated all front office
information. Yet there is still no seamless integration with back office applications
— either legacy or client/server.
Click Fig. 1 To Enlarge
Click Fig. 2 To Enlarge
It is critical for an enterprise to have a 360-degree view of its customers. This requires that all divisions and all applications see each customer as a single entity. Information about a customer in the call center must map to information in the accounting department and the sales department. Because customers interact with the enterprise via a variety of channels — mail, e-mail, fax, and the Internet — it is even more crucial that there is a single repository or means of sharing information across the enterprise.
Integrating the Back Office
and Front Office
The industry-leading ERP vendors are in the process of developing and delivering
CRM solutions that will seamlessly integrate with their, as well as other, leading
ERP solutions. These CRM solutions, however, are not yet as robust or feature-rich
as the more established solutions from the leading CRM vendors. Organizations
expecting to migrate to new ERP/CRM application suites in the next six-to-nine
months may find themselves with less than ideal results. In fact, the very nature
of ERP may make it difficult if not impossible for the leading ERP vendors to
keep up with changes and advancements in the front office. Maintaining existing
systems and implementing best-of-breed CRM solutions offers a more viable option
during the next 12 months and beyond.
With the help of legacy extension tools, organizations can provide the appropriate users with access to all pertinent information. This information is created in the back end transaction and front office solutions as well as partners' and suppliers' back office and front office systems. The users may be internal or external to the organization. To focus on the customer, enterprises must work closely with suppliers and partners as well as customers to ensure that the products and services they produce meet the current and future needs of the customers. Indeed, they must anticipate needs that the customers themselves may not be aware of. With the free transfer of information among all these vested parties, the enterprise will be able to compete successfully, retain existing customers and attract new customers.
Making the Most of the Mainframe
Fortune 1000 organizations have the basic foundation for creating a customer-centric
business model. By leveraging existing systems and integrating historical data
within these systems with real-time data from the legacy system as well as the
new e-business and CRM solutions, organizations can achieve a rapid implementation
at a lower cost. It is clear that the mainframe is not dead, is not dying and
will be a viable platform for many years to come. Organizations therefore need
to find a way to capitalize on this investment and the business rules and data
within. Legacy extension tools allow the enterprise to update difficult-to-use
interfaces and present the data in a user-friendly format. Additionally, the
tools allow data to be shared amongst the legacy applications and newer client/server-based
or Internet-based applications. Indeed, many large e-businesses are moving to
the mainframe platform as a means of assuring security and reliability. With
too many incidents of server failures occurring during the last six months at
major online financial and e-commerce institutions, serious thought is being
given to the validity of the mainframe as the platform of choice.
Legacy Extension
So how is legacy extension defined? Legacy extension enables a corporation to
use pre-existing host-based (mainframe) applications (data and business rules)
and extend their functionality at the desktop. Legacy extension speeds application
development and integration by using existing, proven business rules as the
basis for the overall solution. In fact, legacy extension systems encapsulate
the existing business processes.
Legacy extension projects use the underlying host applications and data sources, the additional desktop logic and processing to go beyond the current processing performed in the host applications and the graphical presentation (Windows, HTML, Java, etc.). Object-based technology is used to associate the host data sources and applications with a set of easy-to-use GUI (graphical user interface) objects. Host screens become intelligent objects using a fuzzy logic "learning" model. Data elements become global objects that can provide complete re-engineering of the workflow of the desktop without coding. GUI windows, text fields, buttons, combo boxes, radio buttons, menus, etc. are intelligent objects that automatically sense changes and reflect the results. Using a message-based architecture, the legacy extension toolkit facilitates the real-time integration of data from several mainframe applications, SQL databases, local applications, and data.
Time Is Money and Your Customers
Won't Wait
So why should an enterprise with mainframe or AS/400 applications extend and
integrate these applications to new customer-facing applications? Because time
is money and your customer won't wait for you to implement a totally new system.
They want information provided on a real-time basis now and in a format that
is easy-to-understand, accurate, and complete. They don't care about the complexity
behind the presentation of this information. That is your problem and if you
wish to retain them as customers, you will ensure that each representative has
a complete view of each customer. This complete view will include information
derived from your suppliers and partners as well as from internal business units.
The customer will be able to receive information on his or her account, status
of orders, future products and services, as well as current sales and offers
that are pertinent to them. Internal sales, marketing, accounting and logistics
departments will have all the information they need to ensure that they are
offering the best possible service to the customers as well.
A 360-degree view of customers empowers the organization and its representatives to maintain a competitive advantage in today's new business paradigm.
Conclusion
CRM is empowering Fortune 1000 organi-zations to remain competitive in today's
fast-paced, ever changing marketplace. New channels such as the Internet have
changed customers' expectations of how they wish to be treated by the enterprise.
This includes 24x7 support and access to information about their accounts and
the goods and services offered by the enterprise as well as the ability to interact
with the enterprise via a variety of channels. Each interaction and transaction
must be accessed as if it were stored in a single repository so that the organization's
representatives have a complete picture of the customer's relationship with
the enterprise. This picture must include all historical information that is
stored in legacy systems.
