By Chris Bucholtz

I’ve written at length about CRM failure as an effect of misplaced expectations – the technology does what it was designed to do, but the humans who use it sometimes fail to grasp its true purpose and its limitations. I was apparently prattling on about this concept to a friend of mine – let’s call him “Andy” – who’s a big-time open source programmer-type and even has a couple of O’Reilly titles under his belt.

The company Andy works for has grown a lot lately, both through success and through acquisition. This may explain the circumstances that its programmers find themselves in, which is such an obvious set up for failure that it’s hard to believe.

Here’s the situation: one of the company’s offices in the Midwest bought a whole bunch of seats of Salesforce.com – a lot more than it needed. And, apparently, the person in charge of that decision didn’t want to get caught having to say he or she was wrong about it, so the Salesforce seats were, um, diverted to a new purpose.

What purpose might that be, you ask? Bug tracking in open source development. Never mind the fact that there are purpose-built bug-tracking applications – including some free ones – that would perform the job far better and introduce much less confusion among the company’s programmers. Not only are its features not approriate for the task, but it actually slows and confuses the elimination of bugs. But never you mind, you programmers! That CIO-type is going to find a justification for buying all those Salesforce seats, come hell or high water. Oh – and while there are too many Salesforce seats for marketing and sales, there aren’t enough for the programmers, who end up having to share computers whenever they’re chasing down bugs, which does wonders for morale.

Eventually, something really bad’s going to happen – a showstopper bug will make it through – and then what will people in the company say? The smarter ones will curse the decision maker who forced an inappropriate application on them, but I bet most of them (starting with that decision maker) will talk about what a disaster Salesforce is – and for no fault of the technology. It’s like you tried to use your blender as a vacuum cleaner and then blamed Kitchenaid for wrecking your carpet.

Have you run across any “CRM failures” that never had a chance for success thanks to the humans involved? I’d love to hear about them – and Andy might realize that he and his hapless workmates are not alone.