Claudio Silvestri, CIO, and Dave
Sheppard, Director of Worldwide
Business Solutions, Cognos
GETTING ROI
FROM CRM
CRM BECOMES A SOURCE OF REAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE FOR THE ENTERPRISE.
BY KAREN J. BANNAN
KEN KAMINESKY
ttawa, Ontario–based Cognos is one of the leaders
in the business intelligence market, consistently
scoring high marks in research firm Gartner’s Magic
Quadrant for business intelligence platforms, which
ranks Cognos both a leader and a visionary in the industry.
And yet the company, which in January was acquired by
IBM, has struggled in the past with customer relationship
management (CRM). Specifically, Cognos found it difficult to provide the level of customer service it thought its
customers deserved using an outdated, homegrown legacy
contact center system.
As recently as January 2007, Cognos was using its own
15-year-old contact center system—known internally as
Tracker—which was cumbersome and difficult to customize. So if Cognos, for example, wanted to introduce a tiered
entitlement program, the company would have to spend
up to 12 months on such an implementation. “It required
an extensive amount of testing to do even the simplest of
changes,” explains Claudio Silvestri, the company’s chief
information officer.
BUSINESS AS USUAL
Companies around the world are being challenged with the
latest industry thought leadership on customers—customer
centricity has become the new mantra in strategy meetings,
and CRM software is viewed as a critical tool to enable
