A recent article posted on searchcrm.com talks about a resurgence in CRM deployments and addresses some of the chief problems in rolling it out:

“A lot of people are finding out CRM is a lot harder than they thought,” Nelson said. “If you have a decent IT department, you can install CRM. The problem becomes fundamentally changing your philosophy of the customer and becoming customer centric. IT and business professionals, regardless of industry or what geography [they're] in, are going to face fundamental changes.”

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There are eight core building blocks to CRM, according to Gartner, any one of which can doom a project to failure. They are: vision, how an organization will change by becoming customer centric; strategy; a valued customer experience, determining what the customer expects; organizational collaboration, how a company alters communication to accommodate change; customer information, focusing on the core customer data; technology itself; metrics that can be tracked; and customer processes.

The bold is my emphasis.

The newly realized emphasis on processes is something many companies missed in the CRM boom a few years ago. You see, some people assumed software could think and improvise. Alas, it cannot (yet) and we must be clear about the reasons for implementation and the processes surrounding deployment. Its all focused on the customer record.

We often talk about making sure that your disaster recovery plan and  your backups are in place, they’re tested, and someone’s checking the log files. If we’re very good, and by good I mean we’re being good boys, we will also have a plan to review the backup and do some test restores.

However, sometimes when people are purchasing new hardware and software packages, they don’t think about being able to restore to different machines and different environments. In a real world situation where a server goes out and you need to reinstall from a backup tape or from backup disks, you’re going to have a brand new machine you use for installation. The machine may be somewhere else in your office, but it’s brand new to the code and the software that you’re installing.

Make sure when you’re planning your IT budgets that you look at buying enough machinery or horsepower to be able to do restores on completely different equipment. This may involve using a product like VMware because you can virtualize the entire process. It should make it simpler and easier.

So again, keep in mind, put enough dollars in your budget to have new equipment or large enough equipment to run in a virtual environment.

One of the elements you should consider when putting together your IT strategy is who your third party consultant is that maintains no ties to any of your other vendors. Sure, maybe they know them and they are friendly and such, which they should be, but there’s no financial interests in the other party.

The reason that this is important is because everybody needs a double check against who they’re working with. If you have an outside non-interested - financially or from an ownership standpoint etc. - consultant, it’s a lot easier for you to feel comfortable making a decision. You get a second set of eyes you need because when you’re at the Director/CIO level, you want to make sure that the decisions you’re making are not just seen by your eyes.

Look for a consultant that doesn’t have a tie to any other IT firm. Expect to pay a premium rate for it because if they’re not being paid for the solutions that they’re helping to locate, it’s fairly expensive for them to go from one project to another. So you may find that they are on retainer agreements or that it’s a fairly high single engagement.

Just another tip for you to try to help out with your IT purchases…