Customer‐centric relationship management system development. A generative knowledge integration perspective

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/13287260910932386
Pages4-23
Published date30 January 2009
Date30 January 2009
AuthorSay Yen Teoh,Shan L. Pan
Subject MatterInformation & knowledge management
Customer-centric relationship
management system development
A generative knowledge integration
perspective
Say Yen Teoh
School of Business Information Technology, RMIT University,
Melbourne, Australia, and
Shan L. Pan
Department of Information System, School of Computing,
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Abstract
Purpose – This study aims to create and deploy new configurations of resources via understanding
issues concerning generative knowledge integration (KI) to create a customer-centric relationship
management system.
Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative case study of a public-listed housing developer
was conducted to analyze its main issues and conceptualize the underlying generative knowledge
integration process.
Findings Issues concerning generating KI were identified from the case study. The
conceptualization of generative KI encompasses three main generative KI mechanisms, knowledge
conceptualization, knowledge convergence, and knowledge assimilation, that are connected by three
generative KI processes: accessing and exchanging knowledge, articulating and exchanging
knowledge, and combining and exchanging knowledge.
Practical implications – The importance of understanding the concept of generative knowledge
integration for practitioners is emphasized, and suggestions are given to promote the deployment of
knowledge integration generation throughout system development.
Originality/value – The research conducted is unique in that a new model of generative knowledge
integration is proposed, contributing to the knowledge integration literature in terms of the uncovering
the three new generative KI mechanisms and processes.
Keywords Management information systems, Customer relations, Customerservice management,
Case studies
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Enterprise systems (ES) have been seen as a “best practice” for a long time now.
However, in today’s increasingly competitive business environment, this
comprehensive software solution package that serves to share data and information
through integrated organizational processes (Shanks and Seddon, 2000) can no longer
sustain companies. To stay competitive in this demanding era, organizations
acknowledge that they need to make their systems and operations more flexible to
accommodate rising customers’ expectations (Liang and Tanniru, 2007). In this regard,
many organizations have turned to customer relationship management (CRM) (Gefen
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1328-7265.htm
JSIT
11,1
4
Journal of Systems and Information
Technology
Vol. 11 No. 1, 2009
pp. 4-23
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1328-7265
DOI 10.1108/13287260910932386
and Ridings, 2002) and have committed to provide specific customer-centric services
(Pan and Pan, 2006).
The challenge for such organizations is to customize their ES so that it prioritize s
customers’ needs rather than business priorities (Pan and Pan, 2006; Songini, 2001).
Doing so would help create a system that goes beyond mundane business pro cesses
and fulfills customers’ particular needs and requirements (Soh et al., 2000). To meet
such requirements, organizational teams involved in the develo pment of the
customized ES would be required to integrate knowledge distributed in the various
parts of the organization and also to introduce processes that can generate knowledge
integration. More fundamentally, the capabilities required to create and deploy new
configurations of resources that are used to create such a customer-centric system
needs to be better understood. Such capabilities are often created by integrating the
knowledge residing in different stakeholders. Thus, knowledge integration (KI) is seen
as crucial in enterprise system development (Pan et al., 2001; Ravasi and Verona, 2001).
Against this background, in this paper we look into the KI literature to understand how
knowledge is generated in an organization when developing a customized system. We
consider two research questions:
(1) What are the key generative knowledge integration processes?
(2) How do generative knowledge integration influence system development?
Literature review
CRM is an ES module that provides solutions to develop long-term customer
relationships (Dyche, 2002). Globalization and increasing competition has sparked the
growth of CRM systems in recent years (Gefen and Ridings, 2002). Such a system aims
to provide more efficient and effective customer services, reduce costs of sales, improve
revenue, and collect better customer data in order to improve selling opportunities
(Karimi et al., 2001). Unfortunately, such a function-oriented CRM is not only inflexible
when meeting rising customer expectations (Liang and Tanniru, 2007) but also often
there is a gulf between the system and the user organization’s contexts, practices and
requirements (Pollock and Cornford, 2004). Among the many challenging issues, the
most obvious is the choice between conducting expensive customization work or
undergoing organizational change in adapting and embedding their work practices
and processes into the software.
Recently suppliers of these systems have tried to accommodate the different
customer demands through the continued addition of new and sector specific module s
(Scott and Kaindl, 2000) that prioritize customers’ needs rather than busin ess priorities
(Pan and Pan, 2006). Developing a customer-centric relationship management system
could be challenging as organizations need to gather adequate knowledge (Iivari and
Iivari, 2006) in a context where numerous barriers to knowledge creation and
integration are known to exist (Robey et al., 2002). The failure to bridge knowledge
barriers might cost companies both in terms of costs and time as is evidenced by a
large number of failed projects which have caused extensive loss of market share
(Appleton, 1997; Songini, 2001; Stedman, 1999). KI, therefore, can be seen as a key
problem in ES development (D’Adderio, 2001) that might affect the success or failure of
an organization (Pan et al., 2001; Ravasi and Verona, 2001). Previous research has
shown that KI affects both a firm’s ability to create value and to sustain a competitive
advantage position (Grant, 1996; Hamel and Heene, 1994). In this paper, we focus on a
CcRM
development
5

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