But the personal philosophy that drives Davidson to accept the humbling task of learning a new language reflects what he expects from Manpower's global IT organization. "Life is one long journey of learning," he says. "When you stop learning, you die."
--Chris Murphy
A newly deployed customer-data system is showing Bank of New York that it's possible to transform a highly disorganized situation into a neatly packaged global view of its customers.
Bank of New York, having grown through more than 80 acquisitions worldwide in the past 10 years, kept information on thousands of institutional clients and more than 700,000 retail customers in a mishmash of proprietary applications running on local servers, databases used within specific business groups, and spreadsheets stored on desktop PCs. Servers containing customer data were scattered from New York to Milan to Mumbai, with access often limited to groups or countries.
Trying to manage and track customer contacts and sales activities was impossible. Client-service executives, product-specific salespeople, and country managers all had their own views of a particular customer. Salespeople sometimes called upon existing customers as if they were new customers, and opportunities to cross-sell went undetected. Senior executives at the company's Wall Street headquarters weren't getting a realistic view of the worldwide customer base. "It was difficult for people to get an overall sense of what was being extended to clients or what was in the pipeline," says Robert Joyce, managing director of corporate relationship management at the bank, which manages nearly $93 billion in assets for clients in more than 33 countries.
In March, after three years of planning and development, Bank of New York completed the global rollout of a centralized customer-data environment. The system, which runs on Siebel Systems Inc.'s sales-force-automation software, gives 1,650 employees worldwide a consolidated view of each customer relationship. And executives are getting the consolidated customer reports they need to make effective decisions. "Not only can we better predict sales performance, but we can also track business at risk," Joyce says.
Discover the benefits of scalable backbone and network services for application and cloud providers.
Network automation is gaining momentum. Here's how you can drive this powerful technology to its full potential.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
