Suggestions for a further study

In this Master Thesis I address the issue of CRM system implementation quite extensively in order to get a holistic picture on the critical factors in CRM system implementation. All the three segments, people, processes and technology, should be researched individually to get a deeper view on all of them. I think that all the critical factors I discovered doing this research would be interesting topics for a further research also individually.

This study was executed as a case study and the empirical material was collected from one organization. I think it would be interesting to do a similar kind of study in a completely different industry. This way it could be studied if the results were homogenous and thus generalizable to other industries or would there be a big impact on the case organization’s industry or business field. Such a comparison should also be made with a B2C business. Are the implementation logics between B2B and B2C companies different or similar?

This study concentrates on the views of the system users. I think that it would be fruitful to compare the views of the users to the views of the CRM professionals and the people responsible of the system implementation. This kind of comparison could bring interesting insight on the topic of how well the two views actually are in line with each other. CRM systems are after all usually off-the-shelves products that rely on best practices defined by CRM professionals (Markus & Tanis, 2000). It would also be of interest to do a similar kind of study on the implementation of another ICT solution, like ERP system. This way it could be studied if there is a lot of similarities between the implementation projects and critical points of different ICT systems.

There were lot of smaller topics that surfaced during my research process that would be interesting to explore more closely. One of them was the using of the time-consumption as a direct measurement for the user-friendliness of a system. This finding surfaced strongly on almost all of the interviews and could possibly be linked to the hectic working environments of today and the significance of time. It would also be interesting to compare the actual implementation plan to the realized outcomes of an implementation project. In my case organization the original project plan had been classified as confidential so I could not do

that for this Master’s Thesis. But the relationship between plans and outcomes would be in general an interesting topic for a research. This kind of system implementation could work as a setting for such a study.

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