CRM, Salesforce.com and other software

I just read an excellent article about the misconceptions of justifying software and getting value.
The article talked about justifying salesforce.com to your CEO.
The author talked about 5 misconceptions about Salesforce.com. These misconceptions are valid for many software products, not just salesforce.com
The five miconceptions (generic to any software)

1. Buy the software and the results will come in a few weeks. While the software can be up and running in a few weeks and in use, whether you get value is another question. How is your business process going to change if you are going to get value? How will the software help? This is often the biggest failing of any software implementation.
2. Use of the software can be mandated. CRM products are a major problem here, but others are as well. You can tell people that they must use it, but two things will happen: Your productivity will go down; Your data will not be very good. The biggest benefit of your new software is the data that you capture about your business. If the quality is bad, your value goes down. The net effect can be that you get less value than before you bought. People must buy into the need and get some benefit from it, or you will not succeed.
3. CRM products suffer from this problem more than others. The misconception is that Salesforce is a glorified contact manager. No software product is that simple. All software automates a business process. It does not just sit there and contain data. The process that it automates may not match your existing business processes. You need to understand what it does for you and how you can use it.
4. Low intial setup costs should sell you. Different software products have different setup requirements. Some have an initial outlay for hardware and software. Others do not. In either case, the cost of the software is only a small part of the cost of installing and using the software to get value. If there is no value delivered, the cost is too high. No matter how high the cost, if the value exceeds the cost, you are ahead. See my article on the cost of buying business software.
5. The best way to install software is the big bang approach. While there are some minimum things that must be done to ensure that you have it right, the big bang approach creates the big opportunity for failure. This applies to large companies (and some have had a BIG bang failure), but it is even more important for small ones. You don't have a bunch of people sitting around to work on this. You have a business to run, and change is a challenge. It affect productivity. See my BLOG entry on Chaos.

To see the article on Salesforce.com click this link.