Understanding why marketing does not use the corporate data warehouse for CRM applications

This study uses a previously validated model to explore the experiences of one large regional US health care payer in its implementation of a corporate data warehouse to support the marketing function via customer relationship management (CRM) applications. The organisation invested significant time and other valuable resources on its data warehouse applications but perceived that the warehouse was underutilised by the marketing function. Current estimates indicate that as many as 50–70 per cent of CRM implementations have failed and the figures for data warehouse applications are not much better. Using a case study methodology and independent coders, the authors analysed transcripts from five focus group sessions that they conducted with 21 marketing, information systems and strategic managers at a large regional healthcare payer. Their findings suggest that the ability of marketing to use the system for its functional needs, various aspects of information quality and the internal training were factors that ranked highly in terms of significance to implementation success. In this case, the corporate data warehouse and associated interface often failed to meet users’ expectations.