In a 2005 Forrester survey of 22 Fortune 1000 companies in North America, Europe and Asia, business and IT leaders voiced widespread disillusionment with their CRM implementations. Just 14 percent strongly agreed that their CRM applications had improved end user productivity, and only 10 percent strongly agreed that they had achieved the business results they were expecting. CRM implementations "always seemed to overpromise and underdeliver," says Dolmovich. In fact, for many years UnumProvident’s CIO forbid his IT staffers from using the CRM word to describe their customer data management plans because of the negative connotations attached to the acronym.

In the Forrester survey, executives acknowledged they were partly to blame for CRM’s bad reputation. They confessed that they had not spent sufficient time on defining data requirements and managing data quality. In another survey by Cutter Consortium, 64 percent of corporations admitted that they lacked a formal strategy for using the customer data they had spent millions to collect.

When the company doesn’t have rules and policies [for data], the data has been largely corrupt," says Anthony Lye, Oracle’s group VP of CRM products.

The Importance of Business Ownership
The first step toward creating an integrated customer data system is to sit down with key business executives and ask them what they want. Do they want to focus on keeping the customers they have or on attracting new ones? Are they concerned more with decreasing lead generation costs or shortening the sales cycle? Once IT knows what the business side wants to achieve, IT can help the business identify which data sources are important and which are not.

Next, the business and IT need to agree on an information management policy: Who has access to what customer information and what can they do with it? How will they access that data? How will they make changes to it?

For CIOs, the key to success is making sure the business takes ownership of customer data. At AmerisourceBergen Specialty Group (ABSG), a $7 billion pharmaceutical supplier, the mantra that "the business owns the customer data" has been critical to the company’s CRM success, says CIO Dale Danilewitz. In 1999, when ABSG broke away from its parent company’s systems, executives articulated what they wanted: more granular, reliable customer information accessible in one repository and accessible in real-time. It was Danilewitz’s job to make that happen. And although Danilewitz initially believed that an off-the-shelf CRM system might do the trick, he found that his business users’ needs didn’t align with what was on the shelf at the time. So IT cobbled together a mixture of applications and systems to form a homegrown CRM system, essentially a conglomerate of custom-built applications and vendor platforms and databases. In the center, tying everything together, is a data warehouse that provides real-time and historic customer data, and is integrated with other data stored in ABSG’s e-commerce applications, financial systems and customer data applications.