102825 Resource 102302 102466 102466 1127160940331 1128355202254 Controlled Let's start here: Collaboration

We have to establish a baseline of value, and values, before we can understand the value proposition of CRM. Collaboration is a good place to start.

There is an old saying that I used to hear from my dad's friends: "I knew you when you were just a twinkle in your old man's eye."  After a thousand conversations with managers and executives about CRM and its place in their organizations it is wholly apparent that CRM twinkles in many eyes, today. Executives and managers understand that they need more than what they have right now, they feel a definite longing. However, they are not yet sure of where they want to go or how they are going to get there. Yet. (Now, we'll drop the love metaphor before it gets us in trouble...) So to help them on their way lets put directions on the CRM map. We'll start with a simple but very important one: Collaboration. In one sense an enterprise is really nothing more than collaboration. Internally people collaborate constantly to move product and services to customers. Externally, sales and service collaborate with customers, or clients if you wish, and bring the client's voice back inside the enterprise where it becomes the center of further collaboration. When we collaborate successfully the output is better products and services, delighted customers and, sight unseen, knowledge. We can measure the quality and value of products and services, and we can measure our ability to attract and retain customers. But have we ever tried to measure the knowledge that we produce? Well, first of all we have to capture the knowledge. How difficult is it to capture knowledge? Plenty. We capture knowledge around products and service offerings, and we capture knowledge around customers. Most knowledge requires a link to both product and customer to be well understood. And what tool do we use to capture knowledge? How do we manage the knowledge that we capture? To date the efforts to enable collaboration have been very successful, insofar as adoption of the tool. Email would be the best example. We no longer have to wait in line outside the manager's office. We simply fire off an email and ten mails later our collaboration forges a solution (knowledge) with a nifty little audit trail. The only problem is that we have buried the knowledge in an email inbox to which only the senders and receivers have access. And as they move on ... so goes the knowledge. Why do executives, managers and staff adopt email so readily? And what does this adoption portend for other collaboration tools? The answer is time and ease of use. If a collaboration tool is easy to use and saves time like email we can expect fairly quick adoption. The other key is that, like email, other collaboration tools must have executives and senior management as regular users. The top down approach means that at each successive layer of the enterprise there is a compelling reason to use the tool: Your manager expects it. For CRM to move from twinkle in the CEO's eye to an implemented, valuable solution it must have collaboration at its core. Knowledge workers demand it. They will not be bothered with a CRM system that takes up time without a corresponding decrease of time elsewhere. Knowledge workers are pre-disposed to collaboration - witness the email adoption curve, a straight line up. If the collaboration tool also enables knowledge capture and re-use, the knowledge worker has a win-win proposition. How many meetings can I escape and how many phone calls can I avoid if we embed and reuse the knowledge (solutions) generated daily in the tool we use to collaborate? CRM as a collaboration tool is a huge win for knowledge workers.  But how about customers? Or executives and managers? We'll cover these in the next post. 10 application/xml false collaboration CRM KM knowledge management knowledge worker Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; T312461; YPC 3.0.1; (R1 1.5); .NET CLR 1.1.4322) 69.212.126.205 69.212.126.205 tfoydel false true false false true 205861 false false true false false false true 102302 blog blogsite/SightLines/web