Gartner CRM Summit: Project Managment Best Practices & Mobility

I'm posting in between sessions so I'll have to be brief. I wanted to get up the good information from yesterday's pitches before heading off for more info.

Project Management Best Practices

The key take away from this session was to make sure you have an internal vision and strategy in place and keep to it. This is what will make your CRM project a success.

Matthew Goldman hammered home the need for extensive planning upfront. "This planning process may seem heavy handed at first look, but these processes you put in line today, save you time, money and effort down the line."

"Your CRM strategy provides the foundation for the entire project." Goldman stated, citing this process that builds step by step.

• Business Strategy and Sourcing Alignment (Are objectives clear?)
• Baseline of Current Environment (Mark the start line.)
• Create a Business Case (Mark the Finish Line)
• Decision Point (Where are OUR resources?)
• Shortlist Providers (How can we make this happen?)

So only after resolving your in house issues and clearly defining your project strategies, should you begin collecting information on the enabling technology.

CRM Mobility

William Clark, Research VP, discussed mobile applications and stated we are in currently in the third generation. The first generation focused on voice, the second on email and messaging, and now in the third we are seeing the first signs of solid applications, though nothing is perfected. In the fourth generation, which Gartner estimates will occur in 2009, there will be consolidation and commoditization heralding the age of the mobile application.

While vendors have been pushing mobile CRM for the past decade, it's only in the last 2-3 years that it's become a reality. Even these applications have their limits, but compared to previous iterations, you can have real CRM on a mobile device. Our own customers validate these claims, and should be happy to hear that in the coming generation that should have nearly seamless CRM on their mobile devices.

Clark also touched on what makes a good mobile application device and considered four factors.

• Rule of Four -- By far the most important, "Users should be able to get any useful information within four clicks. Anything less is going to cause user annoyance."
• Continuity of Look and Feel Across Apps -- How different does an application look on a PC vs. your mobile device. If it looks and works differently it's a problem.
• Security Aspect -- How easy is to administer and how safe does it keep the data. "Right now we hear a lot about stolen data on laptops." Clark said, "It's only a matter of time before we hear about lost or stolen data on a mobile device."
• Battery life -- "The Achilles heel across all of mobile is still battery life." Clark mentioned. "All these new applications are a drain. If someone comes to you with a really cool application you have to think, 'Yeah, but what is that doing to my battery?"

Comments

[Global Business Practices]

Global Business Practices