FWIW, I heard TMO dumped their $100M+ multi-year Siebel rocket-ship earlier this year… that was supposed to bring all of this together. Unfortunately, the Biz and IT were never able to get on the same page… primarily due to executives past experiences (AT&T).

Do you know what the #1 application used in a TMO call center? Notepad.

The funny end of the story (well at least for now) is that they sent me two monitors, even though my order confirmation clearly shows only one being ordered.

In your situation, you are dealing with (what appears to be) functionally different divisions within HP, each running under different rules of doing business. I agree however that a web experience should be the same, but this is not always feasible since different divisions operate under different budgets and business climate pressures.

Companies don’t always have the luxury of building a system from scratch that is customer-centric. This is the case with the CRM system and the phone system at T-Mobile as well as the consumer vs. small business website at HP.

The cost of creating a centralized system represents a huge investment in consolidating years’ worth of data from multiple legacy systems into one centralized system. Aside from cost, doing this without interrupting existing business processes with customers is also expensive and timely. In HP’s case, this is an acceptable risk because the top 20% of their customers that bring in 80% of the revenue most likely don’t cross the boundaries between consumer and small business.

Good points nonetheless, and I hope it’s an issue CIO’s and CTO’s address as companies move towards being more customer-focused in all customer touch-points of their organizations.