Acceptance is growing for the need to fuse customer-centric planning with subsequent process design to assure complete alignment. Plus, acceptance is already widespread for the importance of melding process and systems design (both systems architecture and application selection and configuration) to assure seamless process-technology alignment.
Does this imply that senior customer strategists should be cross-trained in customer as well as technology planning to create complete alignment around customers? I believe it does, and in a very strong way.
If you step back and look at the failure of CRM to become “the road to customer-centricity,” inability to align strategy, process and technology around customers – or disinterest in doing so – was probably the second most important factor, after technology addiction.
