For an organization, the ability to consistently define who it considers to be a Customer is a challenging but important task, and the effort to be able to identify an individual customer across multiple departments, applications, and processes even more so. Genentech went live with its Customer Data Integration (CDI) solution as part of its information strategy through close collaboration between IT and the business. In this presentation, the business owner and original IT architect for the solution will present their experience and perspectives of the implementation, future steps, and anticipated challenges for the business and IT/IM communities. The discussion points will include:

• Why a Customer Master?
• Sponsorship and Solution Architecture Selection ..
• Implementation Approach, Challenges, and Successes
• Next Steps and Phases for Customer Master
• Beyond Customer Master - Business Intelligence and-other Master Data Management (MDM) solutions

Mehmet Orun is the Principal Systems Architect for Data Services at Genentech's Enterprise Architecture group in Corporate IT. He was previously a management consultant specializing in integration, migration, and data warehousing projects, and also worked in academic and healthcare IT. His interest and expertise includes data and meta data driven solutions to improve data quality, maintainability, and utility while bridging the gap across applications, processes, and structured and unstructured data sources. Towards this end, Mehmet has earned a double MBA in Management and Management Information Systems, with post graduate studies in Computer Science. Mehmet is the Program Director for the San Francisco chapter of DAMA.

Stephen Thompson is a Senior Manager at Genentech serving as the business owner for the newly launched Customer Master system within Genentech. Stephen has over 7 years of IT project management experience and 6 years of pharmaceutical sales experience. As a principal consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM, Stephen led Siebel implementations for numerous Fortune 500 companies in the electronics industry with a focus on sales and customer master implementations. Stephen served as business owner for SFA applications development for Pfizer as a member of the Information Sciences group, working with a prominent SFA solutions provider in the pharmaceutical industry. His sales experience provides a unique foundation and constant drive to focus on the business benefit that can be derived from IT projects.