Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The New (Redudant and Not So) Little Black Book of Politics
Hey, it's a dead horse! Anybody want to beat it? The authors of "Constinuent Relationship Management: The New Little Black Book of Politics" sure want to give it a couple more whacks.
Well obviously with that introduction, you can imagine that I felt that the book was say 60-80 pages too long in getting their message across that CRMs and integration are a good thing; but my second rant is that the IPDI seriously needs to find a better executive editor. Frankly, I know this blog has typos galore all over it, but I'm writing in a stream of consciousness. If I released a publication with as many typographical errors as was in this little black book at my job, I'd get my litle pink slip and shown the door after being introduced to a dictionary. Same could be said about handing in an academic paper with such gems as "Next, allow your stalwart supporters to delcare themselves the as captains...(pg. 87)" I'd be given a package of crayola crayons (only the pack of six though) and told to draw my own diploma because one is not coming to me by any acredited university any time soon.
So this is what I learned and what was beaten into my head. CRMs are good. Integration is ideal. 100% buy-in from staff is important. Think of your users as constinuents and not customers (difference between the two...blah blah blah). Open Source applications are available. Their is no excuse not to run a CRM. Drupal rocks. My eyes won't bleed if I read 108 pages of redudant text.
In today's Information Age, it is scary to think that an organization can try to get away without a data plan. I admit, I've worked for and with organizations that do not have a long term strategy to data and others who lack the expertise to extrapolate raw data and make it into usable information, but no matter what type of organization you are...everything in 2008 consists of data data data and data.
For a novice or an individual without any professional experience, I could imagine that 70 pages or so of the IPDI study would of been relevant. Unfortunately, I am not that novice. I use a sophisticated database management program every day in my association; I help to teach staff how to use it effectively; and I was part of a development team that built a custom CRM system on top of it to improve the GUI. I can testify that the authors were correct in stressing the importance but they missed several important factors. Let me list them in order of importance:
1) The Chain Principle: Any chain is only as strong as its weakest link. When a robust CRM system is your life-blood of an organization you can live or die by one individual's gross incompetence.
2) The O'Shit Principle: Due to that weakest link it is incredibly important that beyond having an individual or team that audits the data regularly, their is a system in place to back-up the data for retrieaval. Ideally that back-up should be in a third party site in-case of any physical damage to the server that it sits on (e.g. if a fire burned down your office and your server and computers all went up in flames then "o' shit...you're out of data" so definettely back-up your data at least daily and have the duplicates stored away from the rest of your system somewhere.
3) The People Factor: Any system should be user friendly but sometimes a critical part of your staff may be computer illiterate or have his/her own way of doing things out of tradition. Perhaps its a senior executive or a sales person that can't understand how to do something and is embarassed to ask for assistance. Other times it can just be a bandwidth issue where if Joe Staffer had 4 meetings with clients but only has enough time to add 2 of the records than the other 2 technically didn't happen. Like the bar code example for door-to-door canvasers, the system should be as user-friendly and automated as possible but not system will ever be perfect because the technology is useless without human interaction at some point and we're prone to make human error somewhere in the process.
I'm still highly sleep deprived so that's all I will say about the study. Getting up at 6 AM to perform your civic duties to vote + working a stressful marathon day = a sleepy graduate student.
Well obviously with that introduction, you can imagine that I felt that the book was say 60-80 pages too long in getting their message across that CRMs and integration are a good thing; but my second rant is that the IPDI seriously needs to find a better executive editor. Frankly, I know this blog has typos galore all over it, but I'm writing in a stream of consciousness. If I released a publication with as many typographical errors as was in this little black book at my job, I'd get my litle pink slip and shown the door after being introduced to a dictionary. Same could be said about handing in an academic paper with such gems as "Next, allow your stalwart supporters to delcare themselves the as captains...(pg. 87)" I'd be given a package of crayola crayons (only the pack of six though) and told to draw my own diploma because one is not coming to me by any acredited university any time soon.
So this is what I learned and what was beaten into my head. CRMs are good. Integration is ideal. 100% buy-in from staff is important. Think of your users as constinuents and not customers (difference between the two...blah blah blah). Open Source applications are available. Their is no excuse not to run a CRM. Drupal rocks. My eyes won't bleed if I read 108 pages of redudant text.
In today's Information Age, it is scary to think that an organization can try to get away without a data plan. I admit, I've worked for and with organizations that do not have a long term strategy to data and others who lack the expertise to extrapolate raw data and make it into usable information, but no matter what type of organization you are...everything in 2008 consists of data data data and data.
For a novice or an individual without any professional experience, I could imagine that 70 pages or so of the IPDI study would of been relevant. Unfortunately, I am not that novice. I use a sophisticated database management program every day in my association; I help to teach staff how to use it effectively; and I was part of a development team that built a custom CRM system on top of it to improve the GUI. I can testify that the authors were correct in stressing the importance but they missed several important factors. Let me list them in order of importance:
1) The Chain Principle: Any chain is only as strong as its weakest link. When a robust CRM system is your life-blood of an organization you can live or die by one individual's gross incompetence.
2) The O'Shit Principle: Due to that weakest link it is incredibly important that beyond having an individual or team that audits the data regularly, their is a system in place to back-up the data for retrieaval. Ideally that back-up should be in a third party site in-case of any physical damage to the server that it sits on (e.g. if a fire burned down your office and your server and computers all went up in flames then "o' shit...you're out of data" so definettely back-up your data at least daily and have the duplicates stored away from the rest of your system somewhere.
3) The People Factor: Any system should be user friendly but sometimes a critical part of your staff may be computer illiterate or have his/her own way of doing things out of tradition. Perhaps its a senior executive or a sales person that can't understand how to do something and is embarassed to ask for assistance. Other times it can just be a bandwidth issue where if Joe Staffer had 4 meetings with clients but only has enough time to add 2 of the records than the other 2 technically didn't happen. Like the bar code example for door-to-door canvasers, the system should be as user-friendly and automated as possible but not system will ever be perfect because the technology is useless without human interaction at some point and we're prone to make human error somewhere in the process.
I'm still highly sleep deprived so that's all I will say about the study. Getting up at 6 AM to perform your civic duties to vote + working a stressful marathon day = a sleepy graduate student.
// posted by Jason Langsner @ 7:51 PM 
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