Convincing Joe that it's better in the long run if he gives up that information to Melinda in shipping may not be easy. But companies that learn how to use CRM the right way will have an advantage, especially in a wired world that makes it easy for customers to shed their loyalty. Well, yes and maybe. And companies billing themselves as such are cropping up faster than crab grass in July. The premise is easy enough.
Companies generally access the application over the Internet.
So if you want an enterprise resource planning system but don't want to shell out the bucks, an ASP will host the system for you. ASPs make sense in a lot of ways, which is why they've been garnering more than their share of media hype. Many a modern business and service runs on a similar premise. Because signing up for an ASP requires little or no technical expertise, the model means that businesspeople can shop for applications they previously could only get from their IS departments. At the same time, it makes their already murky relationship with the IS department even murkier by introducing the issue of control and accountability into transactions that formerly remained staunchly in the IS domain.