Replying to LO26741
Chris/LO Learners,
In response to your comment below - I've been working on building a system
requirements document for a CRM system here at Northrop Grumman ISS/ACS
and have come to a realization of just what you so eloquently stated
below.
"In many large companies, I fear, CRM implimentations will fail because
marketing is not understood as the complex self-organising system I
suspect it to be."
As I've engaged in this CRM requirements definition process, I've been
oscillating between thinking we need more structure (repeatable processes)
and recognizing part of the goodness of the current process is it's
ability to very quickly focus the organization on specific opportunities.
Of course the best of all worlds is the repeatable and inheritable process
that demonstrates the same sort of agility.
However, in my survey of the leading CRM packages, it seems only lately
are some CRM vendors beginning to position their products as systems that
will adapt and facilitate an evolving (learning) marketing or business
development process. Most of the current vendors would much rather, and
clearly identify as an implementation success criteria, that your
marketing/business development process should adapt to their software.
And, through my interviews of current users and article reviews the
unhappy users are those that let thier CRM software define their process.
And the moral of my discourse is - CRM systems facilitate organizational
learning about customers - however, the systems themselves must be
sufficiently flexible to facilitate the organization taking advantage of
that learning and evolving/self-organizing to new levels of performance.
The major element of that flexibility is in the extreme ease-of-use -
literally transparent to the execution of the process.
Bob Payne
Project Manager, Strategy Integration
Northrop Grumman, ISS/ACS
One Hornet Way
El Segundo, CA 90245
Ofc: (310) 331-7995
--"Payne, Robert E." <paynero2@mail.northgrum.com>
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