What's left to say about customer-relationship-management (CRM) solutions?1 Business commentators have spilled oceans of ink describing the gut-wrenching rise and fall of these programs' reputations. Most large companies have implemented some form of CRM, and many have followed their early disappointments with full-scale CRM remediation efforts.2
Indeed, more than half of all companies investing in CRM consider it a disappointment, according to several recent surveys. What's wrong? It's not that companies are spending wildly; many of them build robust business cases before making their investments, which at this point are likely to be incremental. Nor does the fault lie with the technology itself—most systems provide the required features. Companies have lavished attention on business and technology issues because both were glaring early impediments to CRM's effectiveness.
The core of the problem now is that too few companies are paying enough attention to the organizational challenges inherent in any CRM initiative, whether it involves delivering a new solution, fixing a foundering application, or tweaking a functioning CRM capability. These challenges stem from the wide variety of people—frontline sales and service providers, business analysts, IT professionals, and a broad array of managers, to name just a few—who must collaborate to...