Up north.  Tulips yet to emerge, along the rocky New England Coast.

We are at a multi-billion dollar financial services company.  The office smells fresh and the employees walk the halls with a confident, polished, sense of ease.

We are discussing a potential cloud initiative—this company’s first--with hopes to launch this summer, when the daffodils are drooped and the wispy New England grass shows its brown.  The goal?  Establish a centralized customer “profile” to be accessed by sales, marketing, and operations, which collects and categorizes all client information, including contact detail, account detail, policy detail, and broker relationship detail.

Surprisingly, to advanced cloud thinkers, this very successful enterprise has survived for decades without the need for a centralized customer profile.  Their information and data have evolved from transactions and acquisitions, creating divided fortresses of information that inhibit their ability to collaborate as a unified organization.

What does this mean in real-life terms? 

Well, if you have five insurance policies with this company, you are represented as five different customers.  Sales people can’t easily access information about expirations; service people can’t easily communicate to sales people about claims and needed policy adjustments; management can’t assess the activity of a sales person; management can’t measure the effectiveness of individual brokers; and product managers can’t seamlessly promote their new offerings to existing customers.  And most importantly, all of these tasks need to be supported by emails, conversations, requests, and legions of people, tying disparate databases into Excel spreadsheets which are shuttled up and down the corporate hierarchy, each representing different versions of the truth.

Yet, the company remains ridiculously successful, begging the question:  “Why change now?”  And, perhaps more importantly, “Will they change?” assuming their cloud ambitions are executed and the fortresses of information are opened to encourage a collaborative culture.  For every well-intentioned CRM initiative, half are left in the dust of low adoption and cynicism, despite what the publishers of CRM software may claim.   This company is aware of these odds.

In Bluewolf’s eleven years of implementing Cloud solutions, and more specifically salesforce.com implementation, it has been our experience that older, more successful businesses are the most difficult to transform.  The challenge is less about the technology and more about the organizational commitment to evolve how the business will be managed and measured.

Our advice to this stalwart financial services company?  Go for it . 

While the rewards of 21st century collaboration are still being defined, the risks of staying in the past are too high to ignore.  With flexible and affordable cloud technologies available to experiment and get to market quickly, even the old school business of financial services can find new ways to innovate, better serve customers, and bring efficiency to an industry whose frothy days may yet be challenged.