Starwood has multiple systems containing customer data, including individual hotel systems, Starwood's inventory and central reservation systems, a system that determines rates and another to coordinate all of the communication, says Park. Since these systems don't communicate as well as they should, hotel managers have blind spots. They can't understand, for instance, why some customer interactions are successful (a customer asks for a specific room and it's available) and others are not (the customer asks for a room and doesn't get it). "Today, we can do that [success and reject] analysis to a degree," says Park. But the business users can't see the trends behind success or rejection on a broader scale.

Starwood believes that after its move to a SOA environment all these systems will be able to connect and automatically reconcile all reservations systems data with rate and availability data to ensure that accommodations are available at the right price, place and time. There's so much data flowing through Starwood's systems (upwards of a billion distinct pieces of data) that ironing out the meta-data plan from the get-go is paramount. And the pressure is on, especially from the business side. "It's not a nice-to-have system; it's an absolute necessity to survive," Park says of the SOA migration.

As is the case with all CRM-type implementations, the move to SOA and a customer data management solution won't come cheaply. Forrester's Wang says that an average CDI installation costs around $US1 million for licences and requires implementation services in the $US3.5 million to $US4 million range. In addition, rolling out a CDI hub often can take longer than what the vendors promise, which is what happened at UnumProvident. Dolmovich notes that while IT is adding customer data to the CDI hub, it still has to maintain some synchronization of data with the old system until it can be replaced. "It's rare that the initial implementation of a CDI hub actually replaces its predecessor customer files," he says. "There are often many reasons to sustain both, but you do need to begin a migration whereby the CDI hub becomes the system of record, and changes to customer data are propagated as necessary back to legacy files."

The big enterprise vendors have taken note of the rising interest in SOA and CDI, and Forrester's Wang says that both Oracle and SAP have announced that their next-generation applications will offer similar solutions that they claim will play nicely with each other. But CIOs will have to wait for these new products: SAP's SOA will not debut until 2007, Oracle's in 2008.

In the meantime, CIOs need to figure out alternative ways to fix their CRM disconnects. To Wang, the move is a simple yet crucial one. "They need to take a step back and make a plan," he says. v

Stuck in the Middle

Can CIOs at midsize companies just say no to service-oriented architecture? It ain't easy

According to a 2006 Forrester report by VP

Randy Heffner, fewer midsize companies have enterprise-wide plans for service-oriented architecture (SOA) than larger ones. The reason most often given, Heffner says, is that IT departments at midsize companies are too small to deploy formal enterprise architecture teams. But, paradoxically, an earlier 2005 Forrester survey reported that 44 percent of small and midsize companies said that implementing a SOA was a high or critical priority.

It seems that many small and midsize enterprises are too small to embark on a SOA implementation but too large to move the enterprise in a common direction without one.

Scott Sullivan, VP of IT and services at mid-market transportation company Pitt Ohio Express, is, like many of his colleagues, stuck in the middle. Sullivan doesn't have a formal architecture team and has no immediate plans for moving to a SOA environment "since we're running software that has been built over the years and don't have the need at this time to look at a different architecture", he says. But, he continues, "It is something we will consider as we move forward depending on the nature of the work and how the approach will fit into our overall environment".

Which qualifies as a definite maybe.