Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

Anthony's recent blog post "We need CRM?" raised the interesting issues of the underlying requirements for managing relations with contacts and of the need for a strategy for how an organisation will manage those relations.

In many organisations, there are important business processes around contact management. In the NFP sector for example, there are subscription renewals for membership organisations and donor appeals for fundraising charities and these are often the core (but not only) requirements for contact management and contact relationship management. In commercial businesses, it is often about connecting contacts and customers into your brand and of course ultimately selling your products. Their CRM requirements will relate to these processes and how the organisation wants to manage the contact relationships.

The CRM strategy then needs to identify how the organisation will manage relationships across all contacts, customers and stakeholders, and the priorities between the requirements.

Anthony's point is that it is dangerous to miss out the understanding of the business needs for CRM and the strategy for meeting these needs and jump straight to a solution. And there are numerous examples where companies have wasted very significant investments by jumping straight to a solution.

However, having understood the needs and developing a strategy, it is often necessary to develop and roll out a CRM system and when it is got right, it can transform the business.