How Strong is Your (Customer) Relationship? Why Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems Can Benefit from Automated Change Management

Recent blog posts have looked at the business impact of testing maturity by application and operating system as well as a deep dive on the need for improved testing maturity in E-Commerce.

This post is a deeper look at the second of the High Stress Environments from the study, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.

Two primary areas of interest emerge relating to CRM environments. The first is the impact of automated change management. The second is on the need to reduce the expense of testing changes. Other interesting findings included:

• Downtime for CRM applications is clearly related to the number of changes pushed through the organization. However, the more changes, the better organizations become in dealing with change.
• CRM-supporting companies are more likely to be IBM shops (38% vs. 31% overall) and have the highest level of ITIL adoption at 27%.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Automated Change Management

The use of automated change management systems emerges from the report as the most interesting implication for IT operations teams supporting CRM environments. In particular, for companies supporting CRM applications, 25% of the changes pushed through cause problems in production.

However, those with automated change management find a 25% reduction in the problem rate! (from 31% to 20%).

Customer Relationship Management Environments and the Cost of Testing

Testing emerges as a significant issue for teams supporting CRM environments. In particular, we noticed a significant increase in the desire to reduce the cost of testing compared to the average study participant.

StackSafe recommendations for teams supporting CRM environments

So what does all of this data mean to you? If you are an IT Operations professional, two key points would seem to be most important:

1. If you haven’t already, invest in automated change management systems. Organizations that have made this investment show significant reductions in problem rates when making changes in production.
2. Start investigating ways to lower the cost of testing changes to the CRM environment, perhaps with testing solutions focused on IT operations teams.

Download the Report:

You can download a full copy of the IT Operations Research Report: Testing Maturity Part II – Applications and Operating Systems here.

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Filed Under: Change Management, IT Operations Research, Testing