Starting in August 2014, the Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Student Information Services (SIS) teams within Harvard University Information Technology are joining forces to more effectively record and manage work with program partners and stakeholders using the Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) system.

"Using Salesforce as an integrated tool will help both SIS and IAM provide better service to our program stakeholders, as well as increasing integration amongst the teams," says Gretchen Grozier, IAM community program manager.

The IAM team originally identified the need to adopt a CRM earlier this year, and stood up a pilot using the Sugar CRM product, but made the decision to move to Salesforce both due to the application's feature set and the ability to merge records with SIS, who already used Salesforce to manage customer records. The merger represents not only a commitment to best practices — avoiding duplicate records across multiple Harvard organizations — but also an opportunity to identify overlaps between SIS and IAM client communication, including potential conflicts in contact or meeting frequency, pain points that IAM or SIS services may be able to remedy, and overall continuity of customer experience. Additionally, the move supports HUIT's FY15 goal of establishing an integrated Salesforce offering for university-wide use.

While IAM and SIS each have secured team-only areas for storing details relevant only to their efforts, most attributes of client records are shared-access between the two groups, making it easy for one organization to see when the other schedules a meeting, has a conversation, or delivers products or services to a customer. As a result, both groups can keep up to date on customer developments, avoiding redundant dialogue and opening an opportunity to provide even more responsive, proactive customer service.

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