Why CRM fails…

September 13th, 2006 Robert Bosman

CRM, HRM, ERP software etc. are ‘islands solutions’
that therefore can not survive in the next web.

Let’s explore CRM for example, realizing that the conclusions will also be applicable for all HRM, ERP, accounting software et cetera.

In general there are only two basic models for CRM. The 1st one starts with a person and allows you to enter one or more companies that person works for; MS Outlook for example uses this model. The 2nd one starts with a company and allows you to enter one or more contact persons working at that company.

Both models show only a partial picture of every day’s reality. In the recent past, let’s say until the 70ies of the past century, both models worked reasonably well. Most people worked only for one company at a time, there where not that many cross company alliances and projects and no one used a personal computer nor email or the internet, simply because it didn’t exsists yet. Society was simple as were the technical solutions of those days.

But in the meantime everything has changed. Every day’s reality is a multi-role-network in which people have multiple roles in several organizations at a time, which organizations have all kinds of interconnections. One person can be a customer, a supplier, an employee and a shareholder at the same time and may participate in several inter-organizational projects and meetings. Moreover, this is also the case for most companies. The rise of all those web enabled social networks is only one illustration of these statements.

Using different software packages for CRM, HRM, ERP etc in a multi-role network society is in friendly words ’sub optimal’; they only may optimize one isolated information island at a time, but will never ever succeed in optimizing a global interconnected world. In straighter words: CRM and all other island software will fail in the next society.

Of course, CRM etc will be big business as long as no better solutions are available. But better solutions are on the way, solutions based on a web enabled integral architecture of human relations, which may be called Universal Relation Management URM®.

Both the next web as well as the next society
will be based on a whole new architecture, of which
URM - Universal Relation Management - will be the very core.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, URM, Universal Relation Management, CRM, HRM, ERP, architecture of participation, co-creation, society, practosophy

Entry Filed under: Internet 4.0