IRMA-International.org: Creator of Knowledge
Information Resources Management Association
Advancing the Concepts & Practices of Information Resources Management in Modern Organizations

Software Engineering or Organization Development: A Longitudinal Case Study of a Difficult CRM Implementation in a Knowledge-Based Organization

Software Engineering or Organization Development: A Longitudinal Case Study of a Difficult CRM Implementation in a Knowledge-Based Organization
View Free PDF
Author(s): Bendik Bygstad (The Norwegian School of Information Technology, Norway)
Copyright: 2002
Pages: 5
Source title: Issues & Trends of Information Technology Management in Contemporary Organizations
Source Editor(s): Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, D.B.A. (Information Resources Management Association, USA)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-930708-39-6.ch028
ISBN13: 9781930708396
EISBN13: 9781466641358

Abstract

Many companies have large expectations to the use of CRM systems, expecting to harvest benefits from dialogue marketing and internal knowledge synergies. How should these systems be implemented? And how easy do the benefits come? This paper tells a story of an early attempt, from the view of a practitioner. The perspective is from the inside of the project, focusing on behaviour, being informed but not objective. The research approach is a longitudinal, 6 years, case study of a company implementing CRM both as a marketing principle and as an information system. The implementation was from the outset regarded as an organizational experiment, and the case is told with some detail to give a somewhat “thick description” of the social setting and actors’ behaviour. The analysis focuses on the two research streams in IS implementation, the software engineering and the organization development. Both approaches were used in the project, and it is showed that the organization development approach was the more successful. The reason for this is assumed to be the fact that user acceptance is crucial in a knowledge organization, where the users may chose if, and to what extent, they wish to use the system. Analysing further, it is proposed that an acceptance oriented approach is not enough. While the potential of knowledge systems like CRM seems to be large in knowledge based organizations, the real problem may be the observation that technical experts have ways of transferring knowledge that are not easily computerized. This observation does not imply that the CRM approach is futile, but that both the producers of CRM systems and the people that implement them, should focus more on the nature of knowledge work.

Body Bottom