No silver bullets

I came across a couple of posts on a similar theme – the absence of magic bullets. One from Steve Yegge, and the other from Joel Spolsky.

They resonate with how I see the CRM industry. Hundreds of millions of pounds are spent promoting CRM software as providing instant gratification. Buy the software, load it up, and away you go. As one senior executive – who is working through the re-implementation of a failed system – recently commented to me ‘We saw CRM like we saw the email system – it was essentially just a case of switch it on and it would work.’

There’s no doubt that progress has been made on the technology front. There’s a whole range of user friendly cost effective applications out there that don’t need an army of IT staff to run them. But there’s only so far you can simplify things, because technology is only one factor in the equation, the other’s are process and people – and they aren’t about to get any easier. The whole area of defining what improvements you want the technology to generate, defining the business processes that are required to support them, and then persuading staff to follow the processes in a consistent and structured fashion will remain a major challenge regardless of progress on the technology front.

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