The charge to create a centralized customer database came directlyfrom Benmosche (a former IT guy himself) and his executive committee.The planning and execution rests with Candito, who says about 80percent of his job involves application integration. He has beenmeeting with business customers and their CIOs to determinerequirements for what MetLife has christened the Client InformationFile (CIF). This database will eventually house data for 100 millioncustomers (MetLife's target for 2010) and become one of the largestand most complex of its kind. "The complexity comes not only from thepotential size of the database but also the number of different placesthis data will come from," explains Johnston. "I think it will be oneof the more complex information networks ever created."

Candito and his CIO counterparts mapped out anticipated returns fromthe CIF for each line of business and chose Toronto-based DWL as thevendor. DWL Customer acts as middleware between the source data (from30 different MetLife systems) and applications, creating a "gold copy"of customer information for expediency, cost and real-timeavailability. MetLife's legacy systems will communicate with eachother through an XML interface, and an IBMIBM Shark storage system willstore the customer data file. Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de

Candito then developed a data model using industry standards andcreated a central data administration group. Prior to implementation,MetLife worked with the vendor to determine data entities andattributes, and set performance and volume metrics for benchmarking."We got DWL to extend their model to be more supportive of what abroad-based financial service institution needs," says Candito. "Andbecause of the large scale of this, we knew we had to do a lot of dataanalysis up front."

This spring, MetLife rolled out a pilot of the customer informationfile for new customers only. By June, MetLife will have implementedcore components of the CIF, including the underlying software, datamodel and business rules for capturing client information at the frontend of a client acquisition process. In November 2002, the firstadministrative systems in MetLife's individual business unit will beconverted to the CIF, with rollout continuing throughout 2003. Canditowill begin the CIF conversion of MetLife's institutional businesssystems in 2003, then prioritize and convert Met's remaining businessunits.

As with the PeopleSoft conversion, application rollout will be theeasy part. Business process and cultural changes have been trickier.For example, Candito and his team are considering whether to set up acentralized client management group within MetLife to address customerservices currently handled at the business unit level. Business unitleaders are still antsy about the shift. "We got a small group of ourkey business customers together, and intellectually they agreed it wasthe right thing to do, but emotionally they were afraid to give upcontrol," Candito says. "It's a part of change."