Nov Reality-final.qxd

10/11/04

2:49 PM

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REALITY CHECK
BY

BARTON GOLDENBERG

Who Really Owns the
CRM Initiative?
The battle between business and IT for control of users’ desktops

D

URING the past month
I’ve been doing my best to mediate a brouhaha at a global high-tech manufacturer. The struggle is between the two CRM cosponsors: the vice president for global sales and service and the global CIO.
The CIO insists on owning the users’ desktop—this translates into the CRM application being run within a portal controlled by the IT shop. The vice president views the CRM application as the essential tool for implementing the day-to-day work of many thousands of internal users, and thinks the application will be optimized only when these internal users have direct or native access to it,
i.e., not run within the proposed portal. Both perspectives have merit, but the president of the company has made it clear that only one of these two options can go forward, and that the cosponsors need to work it out.
In building their cases the cosponsors have relied to some extent on input from their respective software vendors, which have their own, potentially incompatible agendas. For example, during one demonstration the

THE VICE PRESIDENT MUST OWN WHETHER OR NOT THE
USERS PERCEIVE VALUE FROM THE CRM APPLICATION. portal vendor showed the CRM application working seamlessly within the portal; however, the vendor had incorporated an old version of the CRM application— the current version would require substantial customization to work within the portal, if it could work at all.
The portal vendor also claimed that other global companies were using the CRM application within the portal without incident. Yet when the vice president contacted one of the reference customers, the customer emphatically stated that the CRM was not being run from within the portal owing to potential response-time delays, but rather was being run natively.
On the other hand, the CRM vendor suggests that running its application within the portal is not optimal, but
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CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | NOVEMBER 2004

has not produced hard facts supporting this argument. Nor has the CRM vendor documented response-time delays or produced hard costs required to customize the CRM application under the portal scenario.
The CIO and the vice president are pushing their respective vendors for better answers, of course, but the decision to move forward with the proposed portal solution versus the proposed direct-access solution will not be resolved by either vendor on a technical basis.
Here’s why: The heart of the issue is, who really owns the
CRM initiative, business or IT?
For me the resolution of this issue rests in the business camp. I can