MetLife and most of its subsidiaries have made the transition to thePeopleSoft EPM system and have begun to trust the numbers itgenerates. The next step is encouraging business partners to use itfor financial analysis and business planning.

One View

Besides going public, other big changes at MetLife have influenced themove toward integration at the application level. Most important, "thechairman" wanted to shift MetLife's focus to the customer. "With bigcompanies like MetLife, you often don't get treated as a singlecustomer," says CIO Candito, "so we needed to create an enterprisewidesystem that would allow us to maintain a holistic customerrelationship, regardless of product sold, in order to increasecustomer loyalty and satisfaction."

In the past, if a customer moved, she would have to make multiplecalls to different customer service centers within MetLife -one for autoinsurance, another for her dental plan and another for investments.This type of situation is clearly frustrating for customers. Havingcustomer information stovepiped by product or business unit also makesit difficult, if not impossible, for MetLife's sales force tocross-sell or up-sell other MetLife products.

Creating a complete customer view is a challenge facing not onlyMetLife, but the entire insurance industry, according to Meta Group'sJohnston. "There's a lot of talk about the enterprise customer rightnow. It's an easy thing to talk about, but it's a hard thing to defineand difficult to implement."