Week 7 Knowledge Management

The case study presented by David Finnegan applies a processual analysis (Pettigrew, 1997) to the implementation of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system from a knowledge management perspective to a contemporary situation within IBM. In the articel it describes about the specific areas neglected in previous CRM studies - sub-cultures, psychological contracts, how tacit knowledge is surfaced and transferred, and with what effects on implementation. It investigates how the system stakeholders and the system itself evolved through encountering barriers, sharing knowledge, finding new uses, inventing work-arounds. The following are some of the issues:

1. End-user involvement.
2.Support from the management and its side-effect.
4. political issue on sharing knowledge.
3.Development schedule (part of resource issues)
5.Data quality and migration issues.
6User training.
7.Data mining and Integration.
8.Lack of customer clear-vision.

The above issues are very similar to the Data warehousing issues. It is said by many authors that around 60% to 80% of the CRM project fails due to strategic issues. In the case, IBM is a company very experience in IT development, and has enough resource and specialist to overcome most technical problems. However, they still encoutner the issues mentioned above and struggle introducing CRM to the organizationi.