Integrating diverse Web applications, especially in this age of
mergers and partnerships, is no easy task. David Bicknell looks at
how Royal Sun Alliance has tackled its integration dilemma
Eighteen months ago, as traditional companies began getting to
grips with the Web, their various departments were all encouraged
to build Web applications; to play around with and learn to
understand the technology. So lines of businesses all developed Web
applications. They all planned and budgeted separately, exposing
their departmental systems using different development tools and
isolated databases. This approach benefited neither the customer,
nor corporate management.
For the customer, it meant often having to register details
separately on different parts of a portal, or having to log-in to
different parts separately, with different user names and
passwords. It often meant having to repeat personal details, such
as an address, when trying to get buying details or quotes.
For corporate management, there was no management information - no
ability to track user visits, activity and paths across the company
portal as a whole. Nor was there the ability to track visitors on
any partners' sites or cross-sell through knowledge of customers'
navigation paths through the portal. The poor linkage to call
centre customer relationship management systems affected customer
service, and overheads increased as a result of having to manage
multiple Web development projects with different technologies and
skillsets.
This is a common problem across all industries that have had to
embrace the Web. The creation of what are known as separate 'silos'
has meant that the majority of Web portals offer little
transparency, and little meaningful management information.
One company that faced precisely these problems recently was UK
insurer Royal & Sun Alliance (RSA). Having gone through a 1996
merger between Royal Insurance and Sun Alliance, it needed to
integrate the two companies' product lines. Although it had a
direct presence, offering separate insurance products for the home,
motor, travel, life, health and investments sectors, the insurer
wanted to create a lifestyle package, thus integrating all these
separate insurances into an easy-to-use solution for the customer,
which in turn would yield more business.
What was equally important to RSA was creating an online brand that
would be synonymous with excellent service, giving customers
complete choice of communication channels and always going the
extra mile to solve customer problems. But it realised that opening
up all its existing systems to customers also meant opening up all
its foibles to customers as well.
Currently, RSA has about two million customers using only one RSA
product each. The company wanted to increase its customer numbers
by 400,000 a year and by 2004 wanted to take that customer holding
up from one to three products. It needed to ensure that the system
facilitated compliance with financial services rules, that it could
get new products to market quickly and that it could add sticky
content equally quickly.
Some of RSA's insurance offerings are co-branded with partners such
as What Car magazine. But RSA was frustrated that despite spending
money to buy content through online partnerships it was unable to
measure the spend's effectiveness. It wanted the new brand to solve
that issue, too.
An additional problem for RSA was that it wanted to develop its new
brand ultra-quickly, needing to get the brand out before the summer
slowdown. After appointing a new marketing director, Mike
Tildesley, to develop the brand, dubbed 'More Than' - an exercise
which took from September to January - the company had just five
months to deliver the project. RSA insiders suggested that they did
not have enough time to implement the project.
There were organisational and technical problems associated with
delivering the new brand. The organisational challenges included
becoming more risk-tolerant and making failure acceptable;
consolidating the work of 11 internal and 15 external IT
departments; doing parallel development; having clear
accountability and regular communications; and making sure that
project stakeholders were able to make decisions on-the-fly.
The technical problems included different silos of technology for
different insurance products; different silos of technology for
different customer touchpoint technologies, such as PC, WAP phone
and digital TV; a different look and feel embedded in each silo; no
consolidated content management and no consolidated business
intelligence.
According to Tildesley, the whole system was "organised entirely
the wrong way for our customers and for us".
Having taken a decision to undergo the rebranding exercise, RSA was
then faced with the problem of how to do it both quickly and
cost-effectively. It had three choices. It could completely rewrite
existing Web applications, but this approach would have been
prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. Another problem was
that the company didn't want to rewrite all that content since it
was happy with 60% of what the existing Web applications already
offered. So, rewriting was neither possible nor justifiable.
A second option was to colourwash the applications to give a common
look and feel. This would have required piecemeal programming of
each of the product-related silos incorporating Web applications
because a look and feel was already embedded separately in each of
them, with all using different suppliers, such as IBM, Microsoft
and Macromedia.
Although such an approach would still probably have allowed RSA to
hit its June target date, it would have increased dependency on
skillsets in other departments. In addition, RSA wanted to gain
portal-wide management information on customers and be able to
offer up-to-date product information as well as the facility to
offer access from non-Web devices such as IDTV and WAP-based mobile
phones. A colourwash would still not have helped achieve those
objectives.
The third option was that it could find another quicker, more
practical approach.
RSA decided to adopt technology that, in effect, put a wrapper
around the existing disparate Web-based applications to create a
single view. InterX's Net2020 software, in essence a Web
application integration package, was the only option, according to
RSA, that would enable it to meet its rebrand timescales, balance
benefits and costs, and ensure existing online applications did not
need to be replaced.
In addition to adopting InterX, RSA also assembled a specialist
team to drive the rebrand strategy, integrate the system and
project manage the exercise. These included representatives from
Ogilvy & Mather for brand strategy, PricewaterhouseCoopers for
programme management, Ogilvy Interactive for Web creative, CMG
Admiral for project and technical skills and London Bridge Software
for call centre software.
In all, the exercise is likely to be budgeted at about £40m, split
roughly 50:50 between rebranding and technical costs. Of the £20m
or so being spent on IT, the InterX solution is estimated to cost
about £1m.
Having got a number of partners on board to deliver the project,
RSA also had to ensure it controlled progress. This was achieved by
conducting daily meetings with all the parties, but at the same
time giving executives the ability to make decisions without having
all the information at their fingertips.
In future, Tildesley hopes the system will be truly multichannel,
enabling users to choose the technology with which they contact
RSA. Already, RSA is offering its clients a facility where they can
receive updates on their claims by SMS text messaging to their
mobile phones rather than via snail mail, although a written audit
trail for those claims still exists and critical correspondence
will still be paper-based.
The rebranding exercise, which has been accompanied by a
high-profile advertising campaign featuring a dog called Lucky, is
an example of what can be achieved in a short space of time. It is
also an example of how traditional companies, having developed Web
products hurriedly and haphazardly in different parts of their
business, are going to have to find ways of ensuring that both
their management teams and customers see an overall view of the
business online, with a consistent look and feel.
What RSA has recently achieved, others will be eager to
follow.
RSA's Rebranding Exercise
Before After
Fragmented brands One brand with coherent
look and feel
Silo-based products Packaged lifestyle solutions
Slow, unique delivery Speed to market
Siloed channels Integrated customer experience
Lack of management information Full management information
Why Organisations Struggle with building silos
CAUSE: Organisational departments and lines of businesses were
encouraged to experiment with the Web, but their piecemeal
building, or creating silos, left portals with a jumble of
fragmented applications, built with different technologies, and an
inconsistent look and feel.
EFFECT: These bits and pieces portals have left firms short
of management information on the value and effectiveness of their
online operation, and left customers having to register their
details numerous times.
FUTURE: Web application integration (WAI), where products
such as InterX integrate the silos by acting as a wrapper for them,
are the future. The alternative to WAI is enterprise application
integration (EAI), where companies re-architect their middleware
layers, but this involves significant programming effort. One UK
organisation with a number of websites wanted to reprogram them all
with EAI tools. After spending about £4m, it has suspended
development.
Web app integration
RSA has used InterX's Net2020 to
strip out the presentation layer of the existing RSA and partner
websites and create a single portal view. It uses page templates
and components dubbed NetPages and NetElements to map to items on
pages in existing Web applications, enabling representation for
portal standardisation, rebranding or merging. Items in existing
Web applications are tagged so that they can be read by Net2020.