Managing in the Digital World - Assignment Example

When the CRM system was decided to be licensed, there were huge arguments about its necessity since such a system would not be suited for selling industrial equipment. However, the decision was made by the high-ups and the license was bought. The implementation of this system was not as successful as was expected because there was no alignment between the business objectives and the technological objectives. The results the top-end of the management wanted to achieve could only be achieved by up to 50% and the huge investment became a waste.

If a more customized and industry usable system had been purchased like a Supply Chain System or an Enterprise Resource Plan, then the results would have been much better. (Jessup & Valacich, 2007) The project aimed at involving the industry clients to communicate through the CRM system with the organization telling them about the quantity they want to purchase, any customizations they require and the time of delivery, etc. Orders from the clients came in bulk and were quite infrequent. Managing these orders had been easy in the past and it was being manually without any problems.

Since no boom in the industry was expected, this project was also considered as not being able to utilize its full potential. The problem, in this case, was the poor judgment of the scenario at hand by the top management. They wanted to automate the ordering and delivery systems however the technological side of the CRM could do much more than automating these two functions. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 was also able to maximize the marketing capabilities of the organization. In this case, marketing wasn't the objective and no one had ever thought about marketing the industry equipment into a brand name.

The company had never put up any ads and didn't even have a marketing department. (Microsoft, 2008)CRM 3.0 also helps to improve customer relationships with clients. The company got business from personal contacts and generating goodwill and relationships wasn't really a problem. Therefore this objective from the technology side of the new system was also negated. (Microsoft, 2008)Lastly, the CRM system empowered the users for the entire sales cycle. In some sense, this was the only objective the organization wanted to achieve from the new system.

However, this module was also sparingly used by the organization due to infrequent orders. (Microsoft, 2008)The project should have been aligned with the objectives the organization was trying to achieve only then the IT team should have been involved to give ideas to suggest a solution for the problem at hand. In this case, the IT department would most probably have suggested that the current business model of manual work was best until more business was acquired. The problem that we see here is not with the implementation of the project, rather with the thinking of the high-end managers.

(Morgan, 2002)According to Livingston (2004), one of the drivers for mismanagement and misalignment of organizational goals to technological goals is the varying view of business executives on the role or affects that IT integration could have on their companies.