The light is better there…

Reading through a book called ‘Peopleware – Productive Projects and Teams’ by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister I came across the following quote:

‘If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you’re like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, ‘the light is better there.’’

The point they make is that projects rarely fail for technology reasons, but for sociological ones. In other words it’s the people dimension that represents the primary fault line. While DeMarco and Lister were referring to technology projects in general rather than CRM projects in particular, their analysis highlights one of the major barriers to effective CRM implementations, namely our obsession with the software element, and our lack of focus on user adoption – the people side.

The heart of the problem is a pervasive perception that CRM is a one dimensional technology challenge. Choose the right software, install it, turn it on and the benefits will flow. The reality of course is that without due attention to people and process, CRM will achieve very little. You can have the greatest technology in the world but if you can’t persuade people to use it in a consistent and systematic way, then you create no value.

Of course the notion that effective CRM implementation is a more complex three dimensional puzzle isn’t a hugely appealing message and is likely to remain drowned out by the siren song of ‘easy to use, fast to deploy, quick results, just £50 per month’ – for some time to come. But if you do want a high pay back project you could do a lot worse than obsessing on the people and the process rather than the technology.

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