INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH IN BUSINESS

Competitive advantage is achievable if an organization has a sustainable, focused, and flexible business strategy. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategy often employed by service organizations in an effort to attain competitive advantage in the marketplace. In fact, the foundational components required for successful customer relationship management (CRM) externally, have direct applicability to internal relationships between organizational IT departments and the business units they support. Business departments and staff are the “customers” of the IT department. The same relationships and communication processes must be built, nurtured and managed very similarly. Horizontal integration and alignment across organizations, especially between IT and the business units they support, is directly affected by the items described in the preceding sections. In summarizing and categorizing much of the extensive literature related to the business and IT integration and alignment problem, clear themes evolved. Relationships, communication and horizontal integration are critical and often causal success factors across each area. These factors form the foundation and building blocks for constructing a comprehensive and integrated assessment model, and a prescriptive framework for improving this internal relationship. This study tries to show the effectiveness of Applying Inward Customer Relationship Management Principles for Improving Business / IT Integration and Performance in banking industry. Our results suggest that Business units need to understand their inter dependency so that there is a blending of technology with processing. Encouraging such interaction requires leadership by example, an understanding of the value to the customer and the organization, performance metrics aligned with cooperation as opposed to individual successes, and local management efforts to build cross-functional relationships.

Inward CRM, Banking industry, Information Technology, Business/IT Integration