Software engineering or organization development: a longitudinal case study of a difficult CRM implementation in a knowledge-based organization

摘要

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 astory 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 implementingCRM both as a marketing principle and as an information svstem. 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 themore 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.