System deployment not the finish line, says IS Partners

A successful solutions approach to business intelligence, customer relationship management and performance management has to meet the business need, reduce risk and ensure rapid investment return.

This hinges on a key, additional focus area that has to form a distinct but integrated part of the implementation methodology itself.

"While the approach to implementations has to ensure business needs are identified and met, through constant customer feedback, structured project plans and risk management, for example, no solution is ever complete without ongoing management and maintenance," says Caron Mooney, Director of IS Partners.

Customers, however, are not always fully apprised of the vital role they play in managing, measuring and maintaining their CRM, BI or PM solutions to continue deriving maximum value from it.

A typical implementation methodology might be separated into any number of distinct phases, each with a specific set of predefined deliverables. The first phase typically involves project planning and defining the business requirement. In subsequent phases, infrastructure requirements are met, development is done and, finally, systems are deployed. User training and maintenance measures should also be addressed.

A vital component of the ongoing extraction of value and benefits, however, is ensuring that, once implemented, the system is leveraged, measured and managed.

"Having identified this need, the scope of the methodology should encompass another phase through which customers` active participation in systems management and administration is encouraged and facilitated," says Mooney.

After a solution has been deployed, customers typically start to use and derive benefits from it. User adoption must be ensured and systems agility refined where required. As with any investment, systems maintenance and management is integral to achieving set goals and measurable, cumulative benefits and returns, she adds.

This will require the correct level of expertise and responsiveness available to users as well as ongoing measurement of the success of the project.

"Organisations often fail to provide the required training for support personnel on newly implemented technology, leaving users without first-line support. The people trained on older systems are certainly not ideally equipped to provide this vital function, which can affect the overall value of the system to the organisation," says Mooney.

While companies go to great lengths to measure the efficiency of systems responsible for delivering their products or services, such as the production system, for example, they do not necessarily apply the same stringent measures to determine the effectiveness of their BI, CRM or PM system.

"These systems are implemented to track how an organisation is performing against its strategy. The ongoing evaluation of the effectiveness of these systems is vital to ensure that goal posts are reached and the bar moved continually higher for maximum value and expected returns," she concludes.