Every organization will have a different requirement, in one way or another, and the selected CRM solution needs to fit the corporate culture and environment. Differences in organizational cultures, even within the same business sectors, will result in different approaches to developing and maintaining customer relations. Therefore, before an organization makes a decision on which particular approach to follow in the data warehousing development process, the characteristics and corporate objectives of that organization must be fully understood - including the following high-level aspects:
- Business objectives within its market environment
- Level of technology competence
- Capability and corporate will to adopt a CRM solution
One approach to analyzing an organization to determine its characteristics in the development of a data warehouse and subsequent CRM strategy is to categorize the organization as to thinking and acting. Does the organization Think Globally - Act Globally? Or does it Think Globally - Act Locally? Or, alternatively, does it Think Locally - Act Locally?
Pioneering Data Warehouses
The first pioneers in data warehousing were in the Think Globally - Act Globally camp. These organizations made huge investments in technology and took significant to realize important competitive advantages or productivity gains. Early enterprise data warehouse (EDW) adopters skewed the perceptions of analysts and some vendor organizations, which believed the entire data warehousing market would move in this direction.
However, as the market has developed, it has become apparent that a majority of organizations are in the Think Globally - Act Locally group. The entry of major software providers into the data warehousing market, with very low price points, scalable, packaged solutions, has expanded this segment of the market.
Evaluate Criteria
Once the nature of the organization has been determined, the next step is to evaluate specific criteria: time, cost, risk, impact, resources, ROI parameters, and the scale and politics of the business problems that need to be solved. These criteria can be ranked to develop a weighted score based on priorities and internal political realities. In developing this weighting, it is critical to recognize that internal political issues, and other ‘soft’ issues are more critical to long term success or failure, than any hard, technology issues associated with the data warehouse or data mart system. These issues are also important to the success of the ultimate CRM strategy which evolves form the selected top down or bottom process.
The top down data warehousing development process will be more successful if the evaluation of these factors reveals that the organization has the following characteristics:
- Management acceptance of the long-term ROI benefits from major projects
- Appropriate level of human and technology resources
On the other hand, the bottom up, incremental ADM development process will be most successful where the evaluation reveals an organization with these characteristics:
- Management with short-term goals
- Small-scale, corporate culture
- Need to demonstrate measurable ROI very quickly
Whichever development process is adopted, a similar pattern of planning needs to be followed based on the evaluation of the criteria. The same stages are involved in every data warehousing development, which will include: the establishment of a development team, obtaining senior management buy-in, analysis of business objectives, current status and long-term objectives of a customer relationship strategy, the organization's in-house capability to manage the required technology, as well as forecasting the anticipated ROI.
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