Jun 5

During the economic bubble of the late 90’s, and early 2000’s, many companies invested hand-over-fist in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology. With the anticipated benefits that CRM brings, it is no wonder that many companies jumped on the bandwagon.  Benefits realized by the effective implementation of a CRM system include:

  • Increased revenue and profitability through repeat and new business
  • Improved customer retention and employee satisfaction
  • Increased operational efficiencies through simplified management routines

But first, what is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management has been defined as a business approach that integrates people, process and technology to maximize relationships with all customers, through the seamless coordination between all customer-facing functions.

Yet, according to estimates provided by leading analysts, over half of all CRM projects fail to meet their initial ROI targets. A recent study published by Nucleus Research, Inc. found that 61% of Siebel Systems’ reference customers reported negative ROIs from their CRM implementations after two years of use. Another report issued by The Gartner Group, Inc. estimated that well over 65% of all CRM projects fail. There are a handful of reasons at the root-cause of CRM failures. We will review each, and identify the strategy that you can use to avoid common these pitfalls.

I’ll cover the flowoing pitfals of CRMs over the next few days:

  • Viewed as a technical, not a business, problem
  • Driven from the top down
  • Lack of senior management involvement
  • Not targeting the areas of highest adoption
  • Driven by the IT organization vs. business leaders
  • Trying to do too much at once
Jun 2

Aptana has a plugin for Eclipse that makes developing websites and web applications for the iPhone really simple.  Here’s the installation notes from Aptana:

Installing this Plugin via Aptana or Eclipse

  1. From the Help menu, select Software Updates > Find and Install… to open an Install/Update pop-up window.
  2. On the Install/Update pop-up window, choose the Search for new features to install option, and click the Next button.
  3. Set up a new remote site to scan for updates.
    1. Click the New Remote Site… button to open a New Update Site pop-up window.
    2. On the New Update Site pop-up window, type the name of the new plug-in in the site Name text box.
    3. In the URL text box, type the URL http://update2.aptana.org/studio/24131b/ for the update site.
    4. Click OK.
    5. Click the Finish button to open an Updates window.
  4. On the Updates window, check the box next to the name of the plug-in, and click the Next button.
  5. Choose the option to accept the terms of the license agreement, and click the Next button.
  6. Click the Finish button.
  7. Click the Install All button.

Now when you create a new iPhone project, it adds in some nice CSS and other features that makes developing on the iPhone much simpler.

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