With Jupiter Media Metrix reporting that over the next two years, business spend on customer relationship management (CRM) will outpace other IT investments - including supply chain management and content management - organisations are increasingly placing a premium on improving the understanding of high-level executives in terms of the nuts-and-bolts of CRM.
In line with this trend, and recognising that CRM is not a function of IT but of business, Oracle SA reports that it has developed a one-day executive workshop designed to assist companies to move from having nothing in place to going live with prioritised business flows in only 48 hours.
"If we have to go as basic as providing education as to what CRM is about, we can do that," says Glenn Lottering, Oracle`s CRM Business Development Manager and Solution e-Leader. "But that is not the issue in our workshop. We don`t talk about theoretical concepts, but about key business imperatives and identifying the processes that have to be implemented to address these."
To obtain a high level of understanding of this market, he says, organisations may have to spend significant amounts of money with a consulting house to "get to a situation where they still are unsure of what they want to do, and IT and business are still not in alignment with each other."
Lottering believes the workshop short-circuits this costly process, with no costs associated for Oracle customers. "It is a pre-sales activity, and it is done by our business consultants who are not necessarily product-oriented," he notes.
The workshop, which is targeted at key decision-makers and the executives who own or influence the business strategies for the organisations, is run by the Oracle Strategic Services team, which brings with it a wide variety of skills, ranging from e-advisors who advise at executive level, to e-architects who design the building blocks of the corporate strategy.
Defining the CRM strategy for managing customers
The workshop addresses key issues behind CRM, including identifying who should initiate and own a CRM project, whether it is a business or IT project, whether there was full agreement on it, and whether the executive sponsor has the full buy-in of his management team.
By taking this approach the most common "failure factors" or omissions are eliminated before the system is implemented. Gartner identified some of these omissions in its CRM Capability Assessment Research Notes (October 2001) as:
* Failure to map out the capabilities that need to be built and their current state.
* Failure to prioritise CRM implementation based on the biggest gaps and largest benefits.
* Poor business case and inaccurate or no estimate of return on investment (ROI).
* No executive supporting the change management process.
* Lack of forward planning for future improvements and benefits.
"The workshop is designed to address all these points, which are all prime reasons for why CRM is failing," says Lottering. "Gartner in fact recommends that before they start any CRM project, they take our approach and run the Oracle capability assessment tool.
"We also do an assessment of where the customer is as an organisation and where they want to be, ranging from a traditional organisation to a new-generation organisation and anything in between," adds Lottering.
"Then we design a cross-matrix based on where the company wants to be, and its key business imperatives and objectives."
This results in a prioritised set of business flows, which allows the organisation to identify the key areas it needs to address. "It might be campaign to cash, call to resolution, or click to order - whatever it might be; it is described as a business flow concept," adds Lottering.
"The key is that the flows we are talking about allow executives to sign on the dotted line and within 48 hours enable them to go live."
Business flows include, for example, the creation and execution of e-mail campaigns, which are a subset of a campaign to cash flow. "If this is the imperative that needs to be put in place, we go down the level where we even do the value proposition for the organisation," he says.
"The Oracle approach is to communicate business flows to executives in a format that is easy to understand, because it defines the marketing objective, what medium will be used, identifying the segmentation, and what tasks have to be performed. We then get the executives to create the campaign and set the budget."
The workshop concept was launched late year, and has already proved to be extremely popular with Oracle clients.
"In fact, at this early stage the workshop is already being expanded in the way the flows are increasing, and we are driving it down to deeper levels. The concept will be extended into our ERP suite as well," he adds.
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