Patricia Seybold, consultant and author of Outside Innovation, says that customer-relationship management applications represent an old-school way of thinking and that CRM is lousy at addressing important and strategic customer issues. Seybold writes in Optimize magazine's June issue that in order to fix CRM flaws, CIOs must take a radical, outside-in approach and alter their thinking. "Rather than automate your internal processes, streamline your customers' processes. Make it easy for customers to do business with you: Grant them access to your back-end applications using a service-oriented architecture with rich, easy-to-navigate user interfaces appropriate to each touch point and optimized for each of four scenarios," she writes.

For the full column:
- see this article in Optimize