Managing IT Politics and Planned

Managing IT Politics and Planned Organizational Change

The development and launch of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system throughout our company which had the potential to become highly political and mired in power struggles as customer data is at the center of this system. What made this project successful was first, the focus on the strategic goal of taking every information asset and aligning it to the strategic use of keeping existing customers and gaining new ones. It projects that attain exceptionally high levels of success, from a financial, operational and long-term strategic standpoint share the common attribute of an exceptionally crisp, compelling and passionate vision (Raimond, Eden, 1990). In the case of the CRM system implementation in our company, the compelling vision was the ability to sell online more effectively than ever before and also sell more to existing customers. The urgency of this vision being achieved was underscored by the series of new product introductions our firm was planning within six months of the new system going live.

Anatomy of a CRM System Success

In retrospect, this CRM implementation because it immediately challenged the single greatest culprit of failed IT projects, and that is the political infighting over who owns the data and whose department will be asked to sacrifice the most in terms of process change (Petouhoff, 2006). Wisely the project managers created more of a mindset of our entire company needing to fight for its survival by better serving customers through the use of more enhanced and complete customer records, more effective use of analytics to measure the effectiveness of marketing strategies, and the use of Web-based analytics to measure how effective multi-channel management strategies were. For the first time it would also be possible to measure how effective social media-based strategies on Facebook and Twitter had been as well (Bernoff, Li, 2008).

The project management team realized they were in for a political fight over many customer data records scattered across departments. They also realized that each of these customer databases, and in some cases, entire systems, were the basis of each teams' status and ability to yield political power. To rely on anything less than a plea to attack a common competitor would end in failure. The project teams also realized that without an ombudsman to arbitrate the lengthy and strongly-felt arguments that would surely ensure, they would fail. The team asked the CEO to be executive champion and attend each project review. They also asked him to be one of the first users of the system to provide data on customer visits he had personally been on. Reliance on a senior executive for championing any new IT program increases the probability of success, especially when the senior executive shows they are changing how they do their job, changing their daily routine, to use the new system or process (Maurer, 2009). As our CEO is known for being technology-savvy when he started using the new CRM in pilot mode on his laptop and started giving presentations based on the analytics applications still in testing, it suddenly became commonplace for see Vice Presidents, Directors and managers all doing briefings using analytics from the new CRM system. The CEO had been able to squelch negative politics by making use of the analytics data ground-breaking. Our CEO also praised people and departments he found feely sharing data to make the new CRM system function more efficiently. In this regard he was using a positive reinforcement strategy to unify potentially conflicting teams (Lui, Chan, 2008). This was very effective as soon Vice Presidents sent out e-mails telling everyone to look for opportunities to collaborate with other divisions, and discuss how the data they had could help other divisions. This made the task of system analysis and design, one of the most difficult from a project management standpoint to accomplish due to so many people seeing this as their jobs being redesigned and automated so they would no longer be needed (Petouhoff, 2006) much easier to accomplish. As silos or islands of data had led to the development of small fiefdoms of customer data, by concentrating on the need to stay in business by serving customers better, combined with our CEO showing how critical it was to adopt the system and share data, the culture changed. Nothing short of a cultural shift is necessary for any IT system to attain or exceed its objectives (Craine, 2007).