On November 12th and 13th, Jeff Fleischman, TIAA-CREF’s Chief Digital Officer hosted a cross functional web team status in Charlotte, NC.

To open, Jeff outlined mobile and social marketing as two key trends for the digital in 2010, and on ways that TIAA-CREF could become more customer-centric and more effective at “being easy to do business with”.

Then the Digitas team took the floor to present the Prospect and Participant Journey, led by Elaine Hamann, and the Institutional Journey, led by Bruce Buttles. We also heard from Jim Lozier on plans for Wealth Management, Bruce Corcoran on plans for K-12/14, Phil Bossey on new products and analytics, and the marketing team on the Meercats creative.

We topped off our first day with dinner at Dave and Busters followed by two amazing hours of bowling. Thanx Jeff.

Day two began with an eye opening technology roadmap discussion by Kelly Hynes. Kelly was quite candid about obstacles her team was overcoming to bring the infrastructure up to date and asked that we leverage Linda Vickers as the point person for all IT related issues.

Finally, we heard from Cynthia Kellam and the User experience team who were working swiftly on several projects including the desire to build a usability lab, the development of a Spanish version of the site and a new program to challenge college students to build buzz and excitement to the TIAA CREF brand in 2010. All in all it was a great two session of integration, presentation and team building that enabled the web team to build consolidated knowledge about the combined end-to-end activities.