Davis Janowski jumps on the all-in-one-software-is-dead bandwagon with a recent article in Investment News. The article largely documents the conversation flow of a vendor roundtable at the Chicago FPA conference. It’s peppered with depressing quotes from both advisors and vendors talking about how hard it is to make their software applications talk to each other.

Janowski says:

Problems come and problems go, but linking adviser tools so that data entered once can populate several software programs — that’s a problem that seems eternal.

I think that all the industry pundits have now thrown in the towel on integrated software except, possibly, for Joel Bruckenstein, who said nice things recently about both the Your Silver Bullet initiative and Interactive Advisory Software’s integrated solution.

Personally, I’m still a believer. IAS has potential, although I’ve heard complaints that their individual components are somewhat lightweight. We had that problem at Techfi as well; we had an integrated CRM-trading-portfolio package but, except for the main portfolio management component, none of the individual components was in the same league as the best-of-breed competition.

I’m also a bit hopeful that Your Silver Bullet will come up with a generic specification, and I’ve had some thoughts of my own recently about trying to start an independent initiative. I think it is sorely needed in our industry and such an effort would meet with quick success. The only thing holding me back is the personal time commitment involved with building the initial coalition that would collaborate on the generic specification.

I also know of at least one partial solution to the integration problem. I’ve been talking to a lot of advisors over the last couple months in the course of launching FinFolio. These are early-adopter types who are much farther along the technology curve than most advisors. A few of them have managed to sync their current portfolio management software with their CRM and planning systems. They did it using database triggers, which are automatic updates that fire any time a certain field in a database is touched.

A requirement for using database triggers is that all of your software must store data on the same server and in the same database format–in every case with the advisors I talked to, the database was Microsoft SQL Server. The advisors hired developers who write UPDATE triggers on each of the databases so that, when a change is made to the portfolio database, that change is instantaneously made in their CRM database. And vise versa. This is a relatively easy way to sync your databases and it shouldn’t impact the database performance in any way.

That’s a far cry from truly having an integrated software suite, but it’s a step in the right direction. Unfortunately it’s a completely custom solution and imposes non-negotiable technology requirements (SQL Server) on your choice of software vendors. It also can’t handle more complicated data transfers, like current values or rates of return. And it tends to break any time your software vendors send you new software updates.