Research group after research group report that an extraordinarily high percentage of software projects either fail to meet their goals after completion, are delivered over-budget or late, or are simply cancelled outright.

Gartner says half the projects in their study exceeded their initial budget tolerance by 200%. Standish Group suggests fully 1/3 of software projects are scotched before a single user has drawn benefit from the application.

CRM – Customer Relationship Management – projects are no different; they are subject to the same torques and tensions that tear other projects apart. In fact, the numbers are higher with CRM projects; studies show up to 70% of CRM projects fail. What is the source of so many CRM failures? Are there characteristics of CRM projects that make them especially vulnerable? More important, what are the remedies?

Defining Success

Ask anyone at your company what CRM is, and you’ll get your first clue about the source of the frequent project failures. Too many people, from staff-level to the corner office, from IT to sales, believe that CRM starts and ends with software.

In fact, the core of good CRM is the same as it’s been for decades: the right people executing the right processes, using the best possible tools at their disposal. And these days the ‘best tools’ means software that support the relationships between companies and clients.

To get your project off on the right foot, you’ll need to embrace a balanced view of the current situation that accounts for people, process and technology. That starts with some self-analysis covering all three components:

• Assess and Benchmark your current team. What does the organization look like? Who has a customer-facing role, and what do they do? A basic organizational map, along with a list of each team’s assigned roles is an essential first step. If you don’t know what you have to start with, it’s nearly impossible to map out next steps and improvement points.
• Map out the basic contours of the key customer-centric processes, including those that generate new business, as well as those that work to support existing clients. Who does what and in what order? What tools do they use to accomplish these tasks? Think about supporting processes as well, like prospect generation, lead qualification, or contract writing. The most important rule? Be honest about how it actually works, not how it’s supposed to work.
• Create a vision of the future by modeling the way your customer-centric processes ought to be. Now you can set your “AS-IS” information aside and start working through how things should be. For each existing process, you’ll want a corresponding future state.
• The difference between your IS and SHOULD processes represents your path for change.

While technology is an important piece of CRM, companies that focus solely on buying or building the best IT components will too often become another statistic in another research group’s report. Meanwhile, companies with healthy CRM implementations have inevitably taken into account all three of the primary components for success: people, process, and technology.

CRM Off the Rails

With so much focus on technology, it’s no wonder CRM projects often fall into a second major trap: lack of stakeholder commitment.

When CRM software is seen as a panacea, the important players at a company forget that they have an important part to play in a project’s success. As a consequence, there is an endless parade of organizations who spend millions on software, only to find that their people – field sales professionals, sales engineers, anyone engaged with the client – continue to make the same mistakes they made before.

To get through the surf, all company oars must be in the water, pointed in the same direction, and rowing in unison. Too often companies start down the path of change without key people’s participation, either in body or spirit.

The fact is customer relationship problems are typically organization-wide. They require a commitment from decision-makers and staffers to make real changes to how they operate. Those changes may require new people with a different mix of skills; they may require a new approach from the management team; it may force a company to re-evaluate the way it performs basic tasks. Above all, CRM success is dependent on a company following through on its commitments to align people, processes, and the right technology components.

A CRM project team that follows a few basic steps can go along way to getting those oars lined up:

1. Dream big: define your team’s business priorities. Sure, we know it’s to make customer relationships better, but what does that mean exactly? In one company it may mean shortening the sales cycle, in another it may mean making more up-to-date intelligence to the process. Laying out the company’s needs in discrete, measurable terms is a good way to get everything thinking the same way about solving the problem.
2. Face the truth: acknowledge current challenges. If it were easy, you would have done it by now, right? As a part of the early definition of what you want to fix, you have to acknowledge the obstacles.
3. What’s in it for us? Measure the impact of resolving these challenges. If the problems were resolved and you met your business goals, how much would it help? Measure the hypothetical results in terms of reduced costs, increased revenues, or other hot-button metrics and you’ll start to get everyone’s attention
4. Nothing comes for free: do an honest cost-benefit analysis of making the required changes. This step helps you determine the extent to which the team should go to solve its problems. Consider best-case and worst-case scenarios…and don’t forget to show what happens if you do nothing at all.
5. Write it down: create a CRM business case. You’ll want to define all the points above, and puts it into a format all the stakeholders can quickly read and understand. CRM is an investment, just like building a new factory, or hiring a new employee. Modeling the return on investment is the best case for nudging even the most cautious executives toward making a change.

Snatching Success from the Jaws of Failure

With stakeholder commitment, and a holistic view of the solution that touches people, process, and technology, you must now face the final obstacle on your way to CRM success: failure to plan.

At this point, you’ll notice the stakeholders being drawn to slick CRM software brochures like moths to a bright flame. But there’s work to be done before the team starts thinking about technology.

The IS/SHOULD assessment and the Business Case should be the starting points for an overall CRM Strategic Roadmap. The roadmap defines how the company is actually going to accomplish the required tasks, in a step-by-step fashion. The time horizon for the Strategic Roadmap may extend beyond the immediate budget, and it may become more vague as it discusses steps further into the future. But it’s a critical document because it provides overall direction for the team and for the stakeholders. And above all, it maps specific actions to remedy every need defined in the business case.

The early phases of the CRM Strategic Roadmap should be further defined in the form of an Implementation Plan and Budget. The Implementation Plan offers a specific schedule of events for actually implementing the chosen solution.

People may be impatient for change at your company, but planning pays for itself many times over. Too often the planning process is lampooned as a paralyzing activity that brings projects to a halt. Building the Strategic Roadmap and Implementation Plan & Budget is a critical information-discovery and analysis step, and it’s one that companies who have experienced CRM success know to be essential to a project coming to full fruition.

Conclusion

You might hear that CRM is nothing more than the company rolodex. Or you might believe that CRM software starts and ends with a sales pipeline tool. If you fall for that, you might believe that making improvements to how you win and manage customers is easy. In fact, it requires careful planning, and it requires buy-in from key players in your company, starting in the corner offices and moving down the organizational chart from there.

In the real world, CRM is a system of interconnected elements comprising people, process, and technology; any improvements to that system have to be carefully planned and executed. Fortunately, finding the right mixture of those three ingredients for your company is possible.

The road is treacherous, but with the right approach, you can reach your destination.

Are you ready to go?

If you would like to learn more about how to apply these best practices to your CRM projects, please visit http://www.ismsystems.com/lp/crmfails-webinar.php. Also visit our website www.ismsystems.com or call us at 877-553-0485 to set up a consultation. We look forward to working with you.

ISM helps clients successfully leverage CRM through leadership in strategy, business process requirements, technology selection, implementation, and support. Our methodologies and expertise adhere to the best practices from the most respected minds in the CRM and business process consulting industry.

Steve Snapp is a Sr. CRM Consultant at ISM. He has over 15 years of sales and marketing experience in various industries. Since 1995, Steve has helped build the CRM practice from implementing CRM technology to a full-service CRM consulting firm.

Swain Scheps is a technology professional based in Dallas, Texas. His experience includes solution design and project management in a variety of IT specialties including CRM, Business Intelligence, and E-commerce. He is also a writer and author; his latest book “Business Intelligence for Dummies” (Wiley) came out in 2008.

Today’s tough economy has made it more important than ever that businesses build close relationships with their customers.

Some companies haven’t caught on yet, though. 

Dimension Data announced in a report that customer relationship management tools in the $130 billion global contact center industry were of a lower priority to improving operational efficiencies, reducing costs and improving services. The information, taken from the 2008 Dimension Data Contact Center Benchmarking Report, includes responses from 300 contact centers in 36 countries.

“Minimal progress has been made in adopting a more customer-oriented, CRM- based approach within the contact center over the last 10 years since the Benchmarking Report was initiated,” said Alex George, Dimension Data spokesperson for the Benchmarking Report. “When we compared this year’s findings with those from our inaugural report, the picture is not positive.”

Report results show that ten years ago, almost 40 percent of participating businesses had the capacity for establishment of a single view of the customer, and 45 percent planned to soon. The current study, however, found a 13 percent decrease.

The report details declines in other areas, such as companies able to measure or actively employ customer metrics, such as ways to gauge customer lifetime value and profitability.

“These findings indicate that the development of a more holistic and sophisticated approach to customer management is less of a priority today than it was 10 years ago, and there is a back-to-basics trend with contact centers focusing more on basic performance efficiencies and cost reduction,” George said. “This is also reflected in the commercial drivers of contact centers. Only 16% of participating centers ranked ‘creating direct customer relationships’ among their top three commercial drivers, compared with over 50% 10 years ago. This underscores that there has been a major shift away from the tenets of CRM over the last decade.”

Why the move away from a focus on CRM initiatives? It’s possible that contact centers may have been unhappy with CRM packages’ performance—and the underlying question there is, were the systems faulty? Or only improperly managed?

1. the project was late
2. the project was over budget
3. the project delivered less functionality than originally planned
4. some combination of any of these.

Usually, “failure” is a combination of at least two of these situations, which is pretty bad. The reasons for these failures are varied. From management, you hear them say that they still don’t have a sense of their business. Sales people say they don’t find the system useful and end up not using it. Senior executives complain about a lack of return on their investment. I recently met an insurance broker for a very large, national insurance provider who said they were given a “contact manager” that none of them used. He complained that they got new senior management who “thought” they knew the business. They decided on a product that fit the needs of management and gave it to the sales reps, who hated it.

Thousands of these reps are out there not using a very expensive solution, in whose selection they had no input. How long do you think it will take for the executives to realize they won’t get a return on that investment?

Given this definition of “failure,” let’s now look at some of the reasons why. Continue reading this post by following the link below.

This post was written by SearchCRM.com. The original article can be found here.

"Most small businesses I deal with have either tried and failed on a CRM
implementation or are getting marginal value from what they consider a
sunk cost in software and human brain-damage from their implementation."

Here are short summaries of the six reasons why CRM initiatives fail:

• Counting v. Creating Customers – The current crop of CRM systems are very useful for large companies
  with thousands of customers that want to "count" them in interesting
  ways. If you are like most small businesses, you probably only have
  tens or hundreds of customers — your main problem is finding new
  customers and efficiently growing existing customers, not counting
  customers in interesting ways.
• Measuring the Wrong Thing – CRM measures the activities of prospects after they have
  "self-selected" in some way by calling the your office or filling in
  your form somewhere.
• Stuctured v. Unstructured Data – CRM systems are essentially databases with customer oriented forms
  built on top. They are very good at capturing and organizing structured
  information, but are horrific at capturing and organizing unstructured
  information.
• Ease-of-Use – Most CRM vendors say their product is "easy-to-use." The reality is it
  is easy to use if you have dedicated "operations" people or a dedicated
  CRM IT person to figure out how to do the hard/useful stuff.
• "Feeding the Monster" – Like many knowledge management initiatives, CRM requires end-users to
  take actions that are not part of their natural work process in order
  to "update" the system. After all, CRM output is only as good as the
  input — "garbage in, garbage out."
• Transactional Systems v. Solution/Relationship Systems – Today’s CRM is more useful for transactional (i.e. call center) types
  of companies than it is for small businesses who have client
  relationships that are more solution oriented in nature.

Article Source

Author: Brian Halligan was inspired to start HubSpot
because his current toolset of helping small businesses take advantage of the transformative
effects of the internet to grow their business was poor.

The findings of a poll of 100 SME organisations with CRM implementations revealed that while 60% of sales directors insist that CRM is fundamental to their sales processes, a quarter have lost customers directly through their ineffective use of CRM technology.

Essentially sales teams are not using their CRM systems correctly with 44% of sales directors admitting that fewer than 80% of their staff use the technology effectively. The knock on effect is a loss of potential revenue and increasing levels of customer dissatisfaction.

But sales directors themselves are hardly blameless with 72% confessing that they tolerate inefficient use of the CRM they have invested in, while a mighty 73% do not discipline staff who fail to use CRM systems. Common reasons for this lack of use include resistance to changing the way they work among sales people and a reluctance to use new technologies.

"Successful CRM implementation is about more than just technology," argued Jason Nash, Microsoft Dynamics CRM product manager. "It touches on other areas, such as change mangement and defining business processes. If systems are not selected to make the sales team’s jobs easier, then the £125 million a year that medium sized businesses spend on CRM is being wasted."

Teresa Jones of analyst firm Butler Group commented: "CRM as a piece of software is dead. CRM is about business process change and frankly a lot of firms just aren’t ready for CRM. They’re still stuck in the 1980s."

Soon, the manager emerged to shake my hand and lead me to his office. When I told him I wanted to open a saving account, he smiled and asked with which bank I had my checking account. Confused by the question, I cautiously explained that my other accounts were with different banks.

With that, his onslaught of questions began: “How many different accounts do you have? Are they all completely free? Do they offer free checks? Do they offer online access to your accounts?” He practically began foaming at the mouth.

With the interrogation complete, the vomit session began. He boasted of his company’s interest rates, size, experience, and over-all greatness. After about five minutes, he was finally ready to open my account and, for the first time, asked for my name. Nice move, but a little late.

Like many salespeople, this manager completely missed the boat. He lost his chance to engage me as a real person. He never seized his opportunity to get to know who I am, what brought me into his bank and what I thought my banking needs were. To put it simply, he never asked the right questions.

With engaging questions, the bank manager could have eased the tension, showcased his expertise, and allowed me to share my thoughts and experiences. Instead, he interrogated me about my other accounts and bragged about his bank’s features. What did he expect me to say? “You have online banking? I didn’t know that was even available yet! Let me go and close out my other accounts and bring you all of my money.” Why not? I had known him for a total of eight minutes.

He should have started with a simple, “Welcome. I’m glad you chose our branch, but I have to ask you, why are we lucky enough to earn your business today?” What a great way to set the tone, make me feel important, and get me talking.

Then he could have followed with, “What is most important to you when choosing a bank?” This question certainly would have allowed me to share EXACTLY what was important to me. He would have quickly learned that I could care less about how big his bank is, how low his penalty fees are, and all the other stuff that I had the unpleasant experience of sitting through.

You see, there is nothing more personal to someone than his or her money. If he wanted me to trust him with MY money, he should have asked engaging questions to really get to know me. With good questions, he would have encouraged me to talk about my problems and frustrations with my current bank accounts. My responses would have helped him get to know me and create a sales presentation uniquely for me.

If you want a customer to trust YOU with their money, you must do the same thing. Great questions set the tone and get the customer talking about what is most important to THEM, instead of making them listen to what is most important to you.

Your questions are the only way to grab your customer by the brain, evoke emotions, elicit interest, and uncover the information you need to speak intelligently. Great questions make the customer stop to think before giving an answer. They are asked in terms of the customer, but encourage responses that are in terms of you and your company. The truth is, if you ask better questions, you’ll make more sales.

Tom Richard conducts seminars on sales and customer service topics nationwide. Tom is also the author of Smart Salespeople Don’t Advertise: 10 Ways to Outsmart Your Competition With Guerilla Marketing, and publishes a free weekly ezine on selling skills titled Sales Muscle. To subscribe to this free weekly ezine go to http://www.tomrichard.com/subscribe

Consultant, celebrated author and speaker Lior Arussy has made it his professional mission to guide corporations out of this conundrum. In Passionate & Profitable (John Wiley & Sons), he holds up a mirror to show executives the 10 fatal flaws their companies make — from "putting lipstick on a pig" (hiding faulty business processes behind cosmetic marketing and customer service initiatives) to taking "technology shortcuts."

Perhaps the deadliest flaw he talks about is the failure to operationalize, the inability to make customer strategies an integral part of the company’s operations and culture. Here he puts forward an amusing paradox.

Executives go to CRM seminars, read the right articles, learn the right things, but when it comes to the crunch they fail to act on their learnings. They know but they don’t do. "Education without execution is just pure entertainment, and Lior illustrates this beautifully in his book," says Tim Sanders of Yahoo.

However, all is not lost. Salvation comes from making the right critical choices, as many as possible from among the 10 in Arussy’s list. From defining the role of the customer in your business and clarifying the kind of relationships you seek with customers to actually deciding which customers to select and which to drop. From avoiding silo-based ways of viewing the customer to adding innovation and value through post-sales dialogue.

A proponent of CEM (customer experience management), Arussy brings this all together in his chapter on customer experiences, which, as he rightly claims, are the building blocks of customer satisfaction and the catalysts for differentiation.

In today’s time-poor, broadband-connected world, where consumers can shop around and compare between offerings with a few clicks, product advantages are increasingly becoming scarce and a "wow" customer experience is the only profitable way to differentiate.

"Wow" customer experiences are delivered by inspired, passionate employees, but only when there is a lifelong commitment on the part of the company, not one-off initiatives with an eye on quarterly results or fashionable but soulless CRM programs. You can’t fake it, either with customers or employees, Arussy says.

This is an important book and a good read, if slightly academic at times, punctuated with wonderful examples of companies that get it right.

But as with all good technology, it hasn’t actually brought the sales teams, marketing departments, R&D, or customer service departments any closer to the customer at all! Technology is a poor subsitute for the human voice and social interaction.

I really feel sorry for the companies that struggled with the software, spent hundreds of man hours on design and implementation plans, dumped thousands and thousands of dollars into consulting sessions, developed training manuals and trained the trainers, held the meetings and issued management memos only to find that the problem of customer loyalty was the same if not worse.

They had the right idea but they were listening to those lame marketing gurus again! The same guys who have been promoting direct mail postcards as the best choice for farming prospects at a whopping 1-3% response rate!! (Whopee! Where do I sign up?) Seeing technology as a cure all for customer service is a grave mistake.

First, there is a serious problem with the oxymoron Client Relationship Management. Intimate loving families and friends can’t manage their relationships, hence a 50% divorce! How in the heck is a company that sees its clients only a few hours each year going to manage the relationship?

At best, you can sustain, grow, and cultivate the relationship. At worst, you will lose it due to changes in the client’s circumstances or aging, competition, economic and political factors, changing markets or (heaven forbid) your own terrible customer service and shoddy workmanship. But you will never be able to manage your clients. As a matter of fact… it is the client who manages you. They tell you what products they want, and what your product is worth, how they want it delivered, and like green french fries and the Edsel, whether they want it at all!

Companies that have to fight for their customers usually have internal problems. I heard that the CEO of a major insurance company said, " We stopped advertising once, we lost 50% of our business that year." This is a company that has trouble with client retention!

Retaining customers should never be a major struggle, and if it is, you are doing something wrong. It usually stems from not understanding the customer. Going to a computer program to improve customer relations, or find out what the customer is thinking is, quite frankly, nuts.

Let me give you an example from my own shopping habits. There are 4 major supermarkets within a 5 mile radius of my house. One has great produce prices, the others don’t. I usually shop at that market for produce only, because their other prices are too high. I have a membership card with that store. Do they know why I only shop for produce at their store? NO! Will my shopping habits change if their prices change? Yes. Do they know that? No. Can they get that information from my membership card? No. Can they get it if the guy at checkout asks me? You bet! As a matter of fact I have volunteered the information. I have told checkers in passing on several occassions I think their produce prices are the best in town…do you think that information got to the store manager? Probably not! Am I going to seek out the manager to tell him? Probably not! But if I do, is he going to go in the office and make note of my comment somewhere so he can serve me better? No way!

Now,do you think the other stores know why I don’t buy their produce? They have no clue, even though I have a membership card with them as well, they have no idea why I never buy their produce.

In-house customer surveys and focus groups and even "Hi, how ya doin?" conversations put the client and the company on the same side of the table, working together as partners to develop better products, services, and processes, and to cement relationships.

Here’s another example of CRM failings, current gas prices are driving down SUV sales. Can CRM software tell you that gas prices are going to hit an all time high in summer? Can CRM software tell you that your competition is coming out with a hybrid that will save produce 50% higher MPG. Can CRM software tell you that your customer was in an accident that will make getting into an SUV painful and difficult, and that for the next few years he is going to buy sedans? No…but a single follow-up phone call by the salesman will tell you everything you need to know if you ask the right questions.

Building layers of insulation between the company and the client; software programs, autoresponders, marketers, voice mail systems, web sites, and self serve check outs are the death of communication between a business and its clients. Most people won’t try to navigate the maze to tell you they are dissatified, they will just leave…and you’ll never know why because they won’t leave a message on your voice mail or tape a note to the self serve register.

But if you see frustration on a clients face, you can act immediately to turn a problem into a success. Some of the most loyal customers come from a bad situation turned surprisingly good. Case in point, At a fast food restaurant near my office I was carrying the tray to my table loaded with food for 4, all adults from my workplace. Another customer turned suddenly in front of me and all the food was on the floor. Frys and drinks everywhere. The manager immediately came over, dropping what he was doing during the busy rush hour, asked for my receipt, told me not to worry about it, to go sit down, he remade the order and had it delivered to my table within 5 minutes. For months afterward we ate there everyday, partly out of a sense of obligation, partly because we now trusted this restaurant and liked the manager, and we often brought other co-workers with us or brought back food for those to busy to leave for lunch. The restaurant certainly got its money worth on that $20.00 investment. And if we had had to replace that meal ourselves it would have had a totally different outcome. CRM cannot be credited with the success of the managers handling of this problem.

Hire a customer service team made up of people who love people, are excellent listeners, and who genuinely enjoy their job! Hire a customer service team of problem solvers, people who enjoy the challenge of creatively solving problems for people, pay them what they are worth! Train them to pass on all information from the customer to management immediately. Then train management to act on that information immediately. A free service call or product is a small price for retaining customers and gaining referrals, and costs much less than CRM systems. There is no better client relationship than the one that is face to face, person to person. Your customer service employees are the front line. They are your company image, they represent your company much more than your logos or ads. It’s a lot cheaper to pay your customer service people a living wage and use them to get the information you need, than to squander thousands of dollars and man hours on CRM software that cannot.

by Meredith Gossland, owner of Lasting Impressions

In some cases, the organizations do not have a central location to keep all of a customer’s data. The e-mail requests are stored in one location while records of phone conversations are located someplace else. When this happens the call center manager approaches the IT manager and says, “We need a database.” The IT manager then researches the latest in knowledge-bases and buys the technology that will best fit the current architecture.

But there can lead to trouble.

After spending quite a bit of time and money getting this knowledge base up and running, the system still doesn’t seem to run smoothly. Data is not input regularly so the information is often stale, incomplete or inaccurate. The call center manager then goes back to the IT manager and complains that the CRM solution is not working properly. The IT manager protests that the technology is working fine, but it is the fault of the agents for not using it properly. The ensuing result of the project is another piece of technology not being used to the best of its ability and the gap between IT and the business user is driven further apart.

You are now probably asking how this problem could be resolved, as it seems like a vicious cycle. The solution is actually quite simple: Process planning and automation. Customer service failures are often a process problem rather than a technology one. CRM solutions are meant to carry out simple tasks – automatic responses to e-mails, online searches offerings, the logging and maintenance of client information, and so on. However, behind each of these tasks lies a laundry list of human workflow processes that need to be captured and automated before the CRM technology can work properly.

For years users have been trying to extend the capabilities of the CRM technology to capture the work that really needs to be done by Business Process Management (BPM). In the case above, the IT manager and call center manager need to work more closely together to identify the processes that are involved in capturing information. All too often, organizations think there are processes in place, but then later find out that there are deviations from the process, causing hiccups in the overall system.

Additionally, the technology that is implemented needs to adapt to the business’ culture rather than the typical scenario of the business needing to adapt to the technology. This may sound very basic, but people don’t like change and the more an organization tries to force change, the more likely that the project will fail. That is why all too often perfectly capable CRM systems become shelfware.

In the example above, once the IT manager and Call Center manager outlined the processes that needed to be addressed they should look to add BPM to their existing CRM systems.

BPM is defined as the automation of processes using a rule-based system that invokes the appropriate tools, and supplies necessary information, checklists, examples and status reports to the user. In basic terms, BPM bridges the gap between technology and the people who need to use the technology.

In one case, the CRM system was purchased to capture customer data from multiple locations. The system the IT manager purchased can do that, but it can’t make the agents input the data they gather throughout the day. Therefore, it is vital to not only have processes in place to ensure that the updated customer information is entered, but automating some of the more basic functions will aid the overall adoption of the new technology.

For example, when an agent receives an incoming call, a trouble ticket should automatically be launched. This could include a standard form that the agent fills out during the phone conversation. Once that call ends, or if the call needs to be escalated, the agent can submit the form to the system so the data is automatically saved, and a notice is sent to the person who is responsible for following up on the initial trouble ticket. Additionally, if further action is not taken reminders are automatically put in place. If those reminders are not met then the trouble ticket is elevated to the next in command to ensure that there is a resolution to the customer’s request.

By automating this process, the system ensures that the initial customer inquiry is seen through to fruition. It also forces those agents involved in the process to fill out the appropriate paperwork in a timely manner. This keeps the knowledge-base up-to-date, and customers happy because they are guaranteed answers to their questions.

CRM is very useful and can have a major impact on bettering the business, when used properly. It is not meant to solve process problems, rather CRM is meant to better the customer service experience. Therefore, businesses need to take a step back and review the entire situation before making a decision to purchase a new technology. More often than not a solution can be found by using better process management practices in conjunction with the technology that is currently available.

Rashid Khan is CEO and co-founder of Ultimus. He is also the author of Business Process Management: A Practical Guide (www.practicalbpm.com).