Steve Downton, Downton Service Management Consultants Ltd, Noventum Group
"Our advice for large organisations is that Best-of-Breed from any of the top-tier vendors is pretty much as safe as you can get" and "If users sit and wait they will never do anything" Gartner from Computing (BCS Journal). Powerful words for all to hear; is this a clarion cry for action, a call to arms, or should we be mindful of the proverb “Fools rush in, where Angels fear to tread? In addition the cynics amongst us could, in fairness, point to the fact that Gartner could equally have been talking about ERP or MRP or DRP or even ASP in place of the CRM acronym and it would have been all too familiar, particularly with all the war stories about difficult past implementations.
Is it different this time, and if it is, why is it different? I would suggest it is different this time for a number of reasons.
There appears to be much more awareness of the difficulty and issues that arise during major change implementations, also of the costs and time. There are also many more specialists focused on the difficulties of implementation. The timeframe is a hurdle, but according to Gartner in the same article, "The return on investment (ROI) in CRM can be as short as 3 months” which even in the language of today, is fast!
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