September, 2007    SAI-047

Justifying CRM projects in a business-to-business context: The potential of the Benefits Dependency Network

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) projects often fail. Dr Brian Smith, Professor Moira Clark and Professor Hugh Wilson focus on the project justification process as one way of improving project success rates. They review how the typical combination of an Return On Investment (ROI) calculation and a project plan can have flaws as a project justification approach, and propose the use of the Benefits Dependency Network (BDN) as an additional tool. The second part of the paper reports on an exploratory study of the BDN’s use in five business-to-business CRM projects.