After a decade of development, CRM
deployments are still problematic for many companies, as recent surveys
show. Two main areas of concern are employee adoption of new
deployments, and also large disparities between what executives expect
and what the system actually delivers.
Additionally, sales consultancy CSO Insights
finds installation problems, with forty-one percent of implementations
going over budget. The main reasons for budget overruns center around
management failure to plan for user training and post-install support.
This melds with the adoption rates being lower than expected. CSO explains:
”’I’m sure we could pick out companies whose numbers are well above average, and I think we would find those companies have had CRM [programs] for some time,’ Trailer said. ‘But I would suspect the difference is not their CRM [technology] but their management. CRM isn’t what makes the difference; people embracing the tools makes the difference.’” See CRM software fails sales
This is a world of trouble that we rarely even glimpse at Dovetail Software, fortunately. Since our chief focus is upgrading the Amdocs Clarify
legacy install by augmenting and ultimately replacing the Clarify
applications with our own applications, we supply thin clients that
look and feel exactly like the old apps that agents are already used
to. Training is a hugely reduced or nominal item in the deployment
costs.
In the case of Dovetail CRM,
adoption is never an issue: agents come to work and find that what
looks like their old desktop suddenly contains a vast library of new
functions, generally within a click or two. We’ve documented the
uplifting effect of Dovetail replacement software many times. Adoption
becomes a voluntaristic force in our case. But for others throughout
the industry, adoption has always been something of a problem with CRM.
Part
of this is the independent nature of salespeople, many of whom are on
commission pay structures rather than salary; often it’s hard for
salespeople to see the value in spending time making the system work,
and it’s hard to pressure them into taking the time if it takes their
eye off the ball.
But there is usually a more fundamental
reason for lack of adoption, and this forms part of the other syndrome
we mentioned, the expectations gap. Executives often misunderstand the
specific map of the business process that will be covered by the CRM
installation: they expect magic bullets that will “take care of” a
generalized condition. On the other side, IT tends to know exactly what
the system will do, and fails to understand the business needs.
A new survey by Gartner
shows that, while IT tends to get blamed for the underperformance or
outright failure of business intelligence software projects, the more
fundamental problem lies in lack of sponsorship or ownership by the
chief officer level of the organization.
“Burton, who surveyed 350 organizations about their
business intelligence projects, found that only 10% reported their
projects had a C-level executive sponsor with a direct link to the
business. Twenty-five percent said their projects were sponsored by an
IT manager, and 25% had no executive sponsor at all.
“What raised the red flag for Burton, howev er, was
that 40% of those polled said their business intelligence projects were
owned by lower-level business executives. That isn’t ideal, Burton
said, because that group tends to have tactical rather than strategic
roles—which is what ends up sinking a project.” From Business Intelligence Projects Fail Without C-Level Ownership
As IT Director
Andrew Clifford has explained, ownership of IT systems are important
underlying conditions for stable development and the long life of the
system. Installs that perform effectively for a long time are the best
installs.
“Effective owners are vital for long-lived systems.
Without effective owners, systems fall off the management agenda and
quickly decline into unsupportable legacy.” See Long-lived systems: ownership
Again, at Dovetail we’re fortunate that we
rarely see this expectation gap. Often, the Clarify install has already
fallen into the area of despair, and become a thorny issue of whether
the legacy investment can be extended, or should be scrapped. Our open design philosophy
brings upgrades to the Clarify system in the form of open standards
(rather than proprietary) that IT can easily integrate into the rest of
the computing environment.
Having said this however, the
issue of communication between IT and business is pandemic, and is
thrown into sharp relief with software that manages business processes
– it would be ideal to have A Joint Language of Development for Business and IT. We must all keep working on it.
