T. Rowe Price Uniting Customer Data

T. Rowe Price, a $190 billion-asset investment firm, is using software from partners IBM and DeskNet Inc. to more quickly assemble customer data from multiple sources, saving hours of searching through servers that can be distributed throughout separate business lines such as financial services, marketing, and customer communications.

Marrying document creation with enterprise content management has been a sore point for many companies, especially financial-services firms. Paul Macek, enterprise architect at T. Rowe Price, says the firm's employees had been tied up with "keeping track of where information is stored and keeping it consistent." What's more, a lot of the content could be shared only if people knew it existed and had a way to access it.

DeskNet's ContentWelder document-management app has been integrated with several IBM enterprise apps to create a product that combines repositories, document management, and Web technologies and services.

For instance, ContentWelder has been integrated with IBM's DB2 Content Management, WebSphere Portal, and workflow-management software to create a Java-powered, XML-based platform providing uniform access to content while reducing the costs of creating, producing, and delivering content.

Much of T. Rowe Price's content, such as government-mandated disclaimers, can be reused. It's able to store, capture, share, and reuse content stored in various formats to dynamically create customer communications.

Now in the first stage of deployment, the system is being used to create and populate marketing communications such as flash reports, which provide information on investment funds that T. Rowe Price is peddling to institutional customers. The reports contain boilerplate information as well as custom content, Macek says.

Marketing support staff format documents using ContentWelder, then sales staff fill the documents with content drawn from IBM's Content Manager repository. The process consolidates customer communications onto a single platform, featuring such advanced publishing capabilities as content authoring, conditioning, dynamic composition, and business-line personalization.