1. What are the business benefits of CRM implementations for organizations such as Berlin Packaging and Churchill Downs? What other uses of CRM would you recommend to the latter? Provide several alternatives.

2. Do you agree with the idea that smaller organizations are better positioned to be more effective users of CRM than larger ones? Why or why not? Justify your answer.

3. One of the main issues noted in the case is the importance of “good” data for the success of CRM implementations. We discussed many of these in Chapter 5, when we compared the file processing and database management approaches to data resource management. Which of the problems discussed there do you see present in this case? How do CRM applications attempt to address them? Use examples from the case to illustrate your answer.

Zach Nelson sits in a Silicon Valley coffeehouse, sipping a latte, nibbling a pastry, and drawing IT architecture diagrams. His mission: to illustrate what he believes is the biggest reason that the software category known as customer relationship management (CRM) has been unable to shake the black marks of too many failed multimillion-dollar deployments. CRM is easier to implement when a company is young, he says. “The elephant in the room with CRM systems is that there’s no customer data native in them,” says Nelson, CEO of NetSuite Inc., which sells a suite of Web-based, on-demand business applications, including CRM. “That’s why they fail.”