The introduction of “cloud” computing seem to be forcing mass modernization of IT infrastructure. The scale of required demand for computing power surely requires fundamental re-evaluation of assets, methods, and practices which have been developed and deployed during last two decades. “Down on the server farm”, the article published by The Economist, explores economical, political, and security factors involved in planning process.

As servers become more numerous, powerful and densely packed, more energy is needed to keep the data centres at room temperature. Often just as much power is needed for cooling as for computing. The largest data centres now rival aluminium smelters in the energy they consume. Microsoft’s $500m new facility near Chicago, for instance, will need three electrical substations with a total capacity of 198 megawatts.

And we thought the herds of cows generating methane should be blamed for global warming! I wonder if anybody studied a positive impact of IT on re-forestation? With Internet news and advertising replacing newsprint consumption, on-line shopping reduces driving, etc there should be enough evidence to start balancing an impact of progress and present rational analysis of what is going on.

It is interesting to see how the industry based on “disruptive innovation” seem to embrace the challenge because it realizes profit opportunities associated with it. This quote is from “Buy our stuff, save the planet” article published in the same issue of the Economist.

It is easy to be cynical about all this. However energy-efficient computers become, the bigger task will be to generate electricity using technologies that do not emit carbon dioxide. Yet this is one case when market forces and environmentalism align. A cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax, of course, would make such alignments more commonplace. But even without putting a price on carbon, there are already plenty of examples, as in computing, where adopting more efficient technology would both save money and help the environment.

Greenery does not have to be motivated by altruism; and it is far more likely to be effective when it is not. If it helps to reduce carbon-emissions, self-serving greenery is as good as any other kind. The planet cannot tell the difference.

It is a refreshing change in attitude compared to one displayed by traditional industries and governments - “deny until you blue in the face and it will go away”. Perhaps they can benefit from more competition and less regulation, because we badly need some disruption for much more decaying infrastructure outside of IT.

Why is it so easy to forget that IT technology exist to leverage an organizational change? I just read a blog post “IT to Business: I won’t read your mind” describing “successful” implementation of technology for nor particular reason. Why are stories like that so common?

Nothing improved because no one had tried to improve anything.  The direction had been “throw technology at problems and they go away,” but they don’t.  You cannot solve a problem by introducing technology by itself.  You have to understand the problem first.  The technology was not wrong.  The systems worked great, but they didn’t solve measurable business problems.

One reason I can think of is that IT is miscast to lead Organizational Transformation initiatives. I suppose if you hire an architect to help you with a problem, likelihood is you will end up with a house. Or a court case if you hire a lawyer. Do I need any more analogies to make my point?

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

  - George Bernard Shaw

I would state that many IT initiatives could possibly produce better results without technology being involved at all.

I have picked this up at Jim Berkowitz’s e-Journal, who focused on five out of 10 Strategies outlined in the Worcester Business Journal by John Graham, president of Graham Communications. I decided to focus on this one because it is often very problematic in CRM implementations:

3. Get serious about database management. Most companies are in total disarray when it comes to managing customer and prospect information, including those using sophisticated CRM systems.

The issues range from inaccurate, incomplete and totally missing information to a refusal by some salespeople to enter any data. Worse yet (if that’s possible), management often is duped into believing all is well, that data is being collected, updated and tested.

Strategy for initial population of contact data base, and keeping it alive and meaningful, is very often missed issue in CRM adoption and change management planning. Those who assume that users will manually populate and manage it are digging a deep grave for success of the initiative. Multimillion dollars investments were wasted because user community judged the new system “unusable” because of the inadequate data quality. It is easy to blame technology, vendors, or IT for results of poor change management.

The best practice is to automate initial load as much as possible, and do it with the least involvement of businesses community. There are various methods IT organization can facilitate this function:

1. Create logical filters to lift contacts from the corporate email servers. Create process to validate relevance of this contacts for business, and automatically upload them into new CRM contact data base preserving relationships of these contact records with employees records. It is relatively simple and inexpensive project.

2. Identify most popular applications users keep their contacts in, and provide support personnel with the tools for export/import. This approach could be short term labor intensive, but total cost/risk ratio is very positive.

3. Provide scanners, software and support for business cards and other data sources for the continuous contact population in a form of central or satellite location/service.

It is very important to formalize and publish Contact information management process or etiquette, otherwise possible conflicts may arise. This information has very short “shelf life” as people frequently change employment and/or locations and corresponding addresses, phones, emails, etc. It was estimated by Siebel Data Steward SME in 2004 ( I don’t remember his name now) that 3% of data per month is getting bad if not actively managed. There are few technological tools were developed to either ping the contact regularly for changes in their information, or monitor their information changes in social network environment and feed updates into CRM data base. I wrote about one of them before.

The subject of Customer data base in a context of B2B, as a corporate entity has another set of challenges which may be even more critical from the adoption management perspective. Complex corporate ownership structures can cause serious challenges to territory management process owners in sales operations and conflicts around account ownership, without well planned Customer Master strategy. The best practices are to leverage third party corporate information providers such as Duns & Bradstreet or First Data, to negotiate potential data conflicts, and to populate and manage the information automatically.

The quality of data in CRM system can make or break users perception of the system, company’s commitment to change, and professionalism of people who lead this change.