Alignment in the CRM domain: a study into the manifestation of co-evolutionary IS/IT-alignment in a CRM context

Abstract

Ever since the 90s, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has been a topic of interest for organisations because of its numerous benefits, such as improving product and service quality, increasing customer satisfaction and convenience, improved productivity and financial performance and adding various new delivery/service channels. However, despite all the attention, CRM remains a complex concept to grasp. Due to this complexity, organizations keep struggling with adopting CRM successfully. The lack of alignment between business and IT is often mentioned as one of the leading issues of the implementation of CRM. In this study, we used a single case study to extensively research the manifestation of co-evolutionary IS-alignment (COISA) in an eCRM implementation. The results indicate that COISA manifests within all and between almost all alignment processes, except for the strategy formulation process. Furthermore, we discovered additional phases within the Strategy formulation, IT implementation and IT usage alignment processes where alignment between stakeholders differed within the same alignment process. With this result, we have extended the COISA model and help COISA related research by adding important detail to the model. This study also helps organizations by emphasizing the importance of alignment during eCRM implementations.

Date of Award	16 Jun 2021
Original language	English
Supervisor	Pien Walraven (Examiner) & Rogier van de Wetering (Co-assessor)