Ajatus manifesto

  1. The world is decentralized
  2. Sharing is security
  3. You are often offline
  4. Web is the native platform
  5. Speed matters
  6. Everything can be connected
  7. A CRM project is asking for a failure
  8. Related manifestos

The world is decentralized

" Companies that don't realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity." - The Cluetrain Manifesto, these 18.

Remember a time when you needed to share a document with a business partner, colleague or a customer? The CRM should make this easy without requiring complex IT integration setups or the disconnectivity of emailing files.

Sharing is security

"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on FTP, and let the rest of the world mirror it" - Linus Torvalds

You are often offline

Ideas may come to you when you're sitting in a bus, boarding an airplane or visiting a hospital. For a CRM to work the data must be available and editable in any situation.

Web is the native platform

Users are spending more and more time in front of web applications. This begins to make web concepts like navigation, breadcrumb trails and forms the user interface norm.

Speed matters

"Human beings don't like to wait. We don't like waiting in line at a store, we don't like waiting for our food at a restaurant, and we definitely don't like waiting for Web pages to load." - Alberto Savoia, Web Page Response Time 101

Even if the user interface is the most elegant in the world and the application very featureful it will be rejected by users if things don't seem to happen instantly. I cringe every time I need to launch OpenOffice.org to edit or view a document as the start-up takes an eternity.

Everything can be connected

You never know what bits and pieces are relevant to put together: meetings may have meeting notes about them, but there may also be meetings assigned to discuss theme of a given note. Users must be able to create these connections intuitively between any pieces of data in the application.

A CRM project is asking for a failure

"Gartner Group estimated a 65 per cent of CRM projects failed and there are possibilities for this number to go as high as 85 per cent... Ironically, despite the tremendous level of CRM failures, organisations are still rushing towards implementing CRM. Probably that's the main reason causing CRM failure -- organisations are too eager to have CRM that they did not see the actual meaning of having one." - Marshal Yung, Mistakes and Reasons for CRM Project Failures

Collaboration through a CRM should happen organically inside an organization, with individual users connecting as they need.

Related manifestos