The Townsend Report from the InfoStrat Division of Serenic Software

In a previous post, I discussed some techniques for getting developers on board with your Customer Relationship Management implementation. Now for the real challenge...getting users to adopt your CRM. The success of your CRM implementation hinges more on user adoption and data quality than any other factors.  Despite the arguable progress in software features, driving user adoption remains the most difficult challenge of CRM implementation. Much has been written on the subject, such as Microsoft's training and adoption kit . Here are some highlights from my experience: Adopting CRM is not painless.  Help users understand that it will be hard work and sometimes frustrating, but the results will be worthwhile.  Setting unrealistic expectations of an easy process will make it harder to succeed. Show the support of upper management.  This means communications from leaders of your organization, attending meetings on the CRM project, and participating in implementation decisions.

Associations are often ideally suited to gain the most from moving their computing infrastructure to the cloud.   Industry experts point to cost savings, performance, and reliability gains you can achieve by moving your organization’s computing to cloud data centers. In order to make the most of cloud infrastructure, associations need a sound business case for moving to the cloud and an approach to determine which applications and servers should be moved and when.   We recommend a gradual approach to moving to the cloud to minimize migrations cost and disruption.    This approach leads to a hybrid cloud where you will be using some applications in the cloud and some applications on premise. InfoStrat has worked with national associations for over 25 years.  We have helped associations migrate to the cloud and have learned some valuable lessons along the way. This blog series is written for associations that are beginning their analysis of the benefits and costs of moving to

The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act enacted in May 2014 calls for making spending data available in open, standardized formats to be published online.  It is a continuation of transparency initiatives and lessons learned with experiences such as grants.gov, the 2009 economic stimulus under the Recovery Act and the spending site USASpending.gov. Government grantees will have significant new administrative responsibilities.  Many organizations that were tracking grants in spreadsheets or documents will have to adopt more sophisticated automated grant management systems such as Grants Manager to keep up with reporting rules. For profit companies will lose some privacy as a result of this law.  Grant recipients will be required to disclose information including officer salaries. Continued improvements to publishing grant opportunities such as grants.gov may make it easier to find grants. These reforms together are designed to improve the effectiveness of grant programs a