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Just before any important live broadcast, a veteran television producer used to tell his staff, "Just because we prepared for the worst doesn't mean it isn't going to happen." What he meant was that the real challenges are always something you didn't anticipate.
In the battle to preserve and protect data, there is a lot that can and should be done, starting with power supplies. Small companies may be all right with surge protectors, but larger payrolls need to be kept busy, so there is no alternative to uninterrupted power supplies (UPS). If people have time to save their data, and the outage is short, business can carry on more or less normally.
In today's more open environments, there is no excuse for not running and constantly updating appropriate virus protection, but more and more worms are getting past the defenses through e-mail and human error. Staff should be regularly reminded of the danger of accepting messages from strangers.
Users should also be trained to watch out for strange phenomena, either in their software or hardware. If programs start doing strange things on their own, or hard drives being making unfamiliar noises, equipment should be turned off immediately.
Sometimes, all the prevention managers can think of will still not be enough to prevent data loss. That is the time, and unfortunately often the only time when backups seem important.
Even conscientious enterprises can miss a crucial step in backups. The only way to be sure is to run drills regularly and insist that randomly selected files be restored from backup. Even if the backup media has data on it, make sure it's current. Last year's receivables data does nothing for this year's bottom line.
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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a combination of technology and technique that put customers at the very center of the universe, so that no matter where or how they approach the organization, it 'remembers' everything about them. Ideally, a mechanic working on a car by the side of the road in South Africa knows all about the customer, even if the only previous contact was the purchase of the car two weeks before in Sweden. To reach that ideal, companies spent an estimated US$23 billion on CRM software, hardware and consulting in 2000.
For most organizations, collecting, organizing and presenting that much information about so many customers to their employees is a daunting prospect. All the software and hardware must interact seamlessly, employees at the customer end must be trained to use it, and employees who are in position to gather information must have the incentive to key it into the system.
By definition, a successful CRM implementation is organization-wide, providing clear channels of communication that transcend product lines, departments and geography. Without reasonable goals, high-level support and plenty of money, CRM projects can quickly go off the rails.
Because some CRM implementations are sold as 'all-or-nothing' affairs, they can easily be judged as failures because the right information does not reach the right person every time. Now, with more experience under their belts, some consultants are telling clients not only to scale back their initial projects, but focus their efforts only on their highest-value customers. That way, there is clear motivation to succeed and a return on investment that can be measured and then used as evidence that CRM should be deployed throughout the rest of the enterprise.
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