Putting Two and Two Together

The year 2000, in particular, saw an unprecedented technology buyingspree, triggered in part by the mandatory diversion, during 1998 and'99, of IT investment priorities and dollars toward Y2K remediation.Once the millennium rolled over more or less without serious mishap,business emerged from its bunkers to deal with a lot of pent-updemand. It was time to get cracking on those long-delayedprojects - along with some fresh competitive realities. Juicing up thealready high sense of urgency was a brand-new business anxiety: "Howare we gonna keep from getting Amazoned?" A pervasive sense of needingto spend fast and furiously to catch up with the Internet phenomenondrove a period of frantic buying.

Naturally, those who signed the big, scary checks expected that bingebuying would soon be followed by impressive competitive gains. But intheir haste to get someplace fast, many companies neglected the messyreality that their back-end infrastructures consisted of a stew ofincompatible systems that could not usefully interact with oneanother.

Consequently, many newly purchased applications failed to deliver thepromised benefits, says Tim Talbot, senior vice president ofinformation technology services at PHH Arval, a vehicle fleet-leasingand -management company headquartered in Hunt Valley, Md. "Executivesgot sold a product that was supposed to do all these things butcouldn't do them all if systems integration wasn't [in place]. A CRMapplication is not going to stand alone, but businesspeople don'tnecessarily understand that," he says.

In fact, CRM and various e-business systems demand more than basicintegration, which means hooking up two systems so that they cancommunicate. To get real business payback from these applications,companies must make sure that the entire technical infrastructure isinterconnected so that business information can flow freely throughoutthe enterprise.

Wouldn't Drano Work Just as Well?