Compiled by Patricia Brown

CIOs and other IT leaders interact more with their customers — both internal and external — than ever before. Sometimes this interaction comes through customer advisory boards; other times, in direct meetings. Either way, CIOs play a much larger customer-facing role. At many enterprises, this change also allows the CIO to help shape new products and services. To learn more about such customer-facing changes, Smart Enterprise asked five leading CIOs: "In the last 12 months, what have you done to show or deliver value to your customers?" Here's a selection of their answers.

Like so many companies of CA's size, we have made a number of strategic acquisitions over the past few years. These acquisitions have helped us to grow the company and offer our customers more integrated solutions. One of my priorities has been to provide the technology that enables the integration of new employees into the CA family.

As part of this initiative, a major accomplishment this year was to integrate our main customer-support site, SupportConnect, with the sophisticated legacy sites of companies CA had recently acquired. Prior to the launch of SupportConnect, many of our acquired employees had to log onto several separate sites to address their customer issues. There was no one place from which to centrally manage these issues. Our solution was to drive a project, known as Cross System Escalation, to consolidate all the information in one place and enable our support technicians to centrally view and address customer issues. To address our external customers, we used the CA SiteMinder® solution to integrate our UserID and password authentication. This gave the customers simple and consistent access to both legacy and centralized customer-support sites.

But we didn't stop there. We also focused on allowing our external customers to help themselves. We accomplished this in two ways: by enhancing our search engine and knowledge base to provide more information at their fingertips and by enhancing our customer-facing technical support Web site to improve overall ease of use and functionality. To further enhance the experience, we also helped customers find quick answers to any issue they might have, without having to open a support issue or seek additional help.

The new site also provides customers with easy access to product updates, notifications and other related information, as well as direct access to product downloads. Even better, all this information is provided right on the site's home page.

CA, one of the world's leading independent enterprise management software companies, unifies and simplifies complex information technology (IT) management across the enterprise.

Over the past 12 months we have begun to implement our choiceADVANTAGE property-management system. It provides enhanced functionality for our franchisees at a more than 50 percent reduction in initial costs.

Choice Hotels is a franchising company with two sets of customers: franchisees and hotel guests. As the franchisor, we work to make our franchisees successful by helping them with many hotel operating functions. Chief among those functions is attracting and keeping hotel guests. Whereas our older property-management system was a client-server model system, our new system is a true Web-based application services provider [ASP] model. The application operates in our data center, and each hotel accesses the application across the Internet using a Web browser. We already have implemented the system at more than 1,100 of our 5,300 hotels. Further implementations are planned for the near future.

Because the system is a Web-based ASP application, it provides a facile platform for introducing other lower-cost applications. In part as a result, the system is receiving high customer-satisfaction scores with our franchisees. In fact, many owners of other hotel brands have told us they would like to implement the system in their hotels, too.

Choice Hotels is a hotel-franchising company with more than 5,300 hotels in the United States.

At Day & Zimmermann, we are always looking for opportunities to leverage technology with our customers in three focus areas: cost, accuracy and speed. We recently had the opportunity to have an impact on all three when a customer sought a way to efficiently manage technology staffing services provided by both our firm and others.

First, we discovered that we used the same ERP [enterprise resource planning] system as our customer. So we immediately looked for a way to optimize this connection. Also, the customer's previous methods for time collection, time approval and invoicing were manually intensive. So, by working with the customer's procurement, IT and financial teams, we developed an automated bridge between our two ERP systems. This bridge lets the customer's employee time-collection and time-approval data be entered only once; it then creates supporting transactions in both of our systems.

The automated bridge consists of a real-time, Web-enabled, front-end interface with back-end supporting transactions shared between our systems via FTP file upload. This effort has eliminated 90 percent of the administrative burden associated with payroll activities. It has also greatly shortened the processing time needed for both payroll and invoicing. We have realized savings, as well, largely due to expedited invoice payments. Looking ahead, we hope to develop this type of synergy with all of our customers. This type of innovation is not just about technology.

Day & Zimmermann is a provider of managed services for power, engineering, staffing, security, government contracting and munitions products. Founded in 1901, the $1.9 billion family of companies today employs more than 23,000 people at some 150 locations worldwide.

After I joined Emulex in January, my team and I finalized a companywide initiative to combine and improve the overall IT organization while integrating and maximizing the IT service delivery of our two newly acquired companies. This was a significant challenge, as the acquisitions happened within six months of each other. Also, the two companies had operations and design centers in Bangalore, India; Roseville, Calif.; and San Jose, Calif.

The key to success hinged on effective communication and trust. We utilized weekly and sometimes twice-weekly video conference calls. These frequent discussions led to effective and collaborative team building. We leveraged our combined skills and existing strengths in our information systems.

Despite the system integration and technical challenges associated with merging three IT departments across both national and international boundaries, this business-alignment project has proven valuable to our customers. We have completed a seamless transition of joining or modifying major operations worldwide while minimizing service disruption.

One key challenge was building trust with new team members. We needed to persuade these new team members that we would leverage their strengths, contributions and systems over the long haul. Other challenges included working across new time zones and with different approaches to key infrastructure, such as security, storage and enterprise applications.

Now our combined customers can benefit from our additional skill sets, diverse views and improved applications and services. At the same time, our customers also enjoy a more robust and reliable infrastructure than is available from smaller enterprises. We now support our worldwide customers as one global, functional team. We share best practices from various regions and reduce redundancies so that our customers are served with the utmost efficiency and responsiveness.

Emulex is a global provider of enterprise-class solutions and technologies for storage, servers and networks.

Superior IT management and up-to-date resource availability are critical components for us to ensure a client's trust. That's true whether we're working on a high-rise tower or a small interior renovation. In the last year we developed a customized software package called Impact. It provides real-time access to budget, project management and design information to help foster a high level of customer confidence. Using a client-server environment, we link 24 remote construction sites to Plaza headquarters to deliver real-time and relevant project updates; then we share updates with clients via Impact.

Because access to this data must be both secure and always available, we have deployed technology with high-availability, clustered firewalls that work together to load-balance multiple ISPs and maintain VPN connections across multiple construction sites. This guarantees network uptime to all of our customers. For example, even if a communication line is accidentally cut — a common threat on rugged construction sites — we can still maintain our VPN connections. Even better, this connection is transparent to customers logging in for an up-to-date view of their project's status.

Our ability to give customers 24x7 access to pertinent project information, while ensuring the privacy of their data, is a key competitive differentiator. In the construction business, on-site change management and delivery fluctuations directly affect cost and budget. Time is literally money. Downtime costs can be huge. Whether we're working with a local university or a new commercial high-rise on Park Avenue, our clients have control and input over their project status. This, in turn, helps us use the right mix of resources to support a project's goals and timelines.

Plaza Construction is a construction-management corporation with more than 400 employees and 300 remote users.

Patricia Brown is the executive editor of Smart Enterprise. She was formerly the senior executive editor of Optimize magazine.