Rodent Regatta

Halliburton and Siebel aren’t saying that anything went wrong in their deployment of a global CRM (customer relationship management) system. What’s clear is that PeopleSoft has somehow convinced Halliburton to abandon a past investment and invest again. All of this is in the interest of ”getting close to your customers” – something that once was done with a box of 3×5 index cards.

Following the index cards was something the computer industry called ”sales force automation.” In fact, one of the players at the low end of sales force automation is called salesforce.com. Now SAP is chasing the business and Microsoft has set their sights there as well.

Absent strong leadership, investments in software are no different from other business fads. The results seldom live up the potential or the presentation done to justify the investment. Whether your business contemplates a major new sales force automation/CRM project or team-based management or Six Sigma or any of the dozens of other improvement initiatives, make sure the owner and/or CEO is squarely behind the effort and committed to see it through. Otherwise, it will be scrapped in less than 36 months.