Keith didn't pull any punches. I decided to ask some CRM vendors what they thought of that statement. Oracle's Vice President of CRM Product Strategy Mark Woollen thought the statement was provocative, but also timely. Here's some of what he had to say:

"It's all well and good to operationalize CRM. Get it out there, start using it, incorporate it into your DNA, understand your customer interactions. But if all you do is have forms on a database, and enter in customer data, and call it a day, you're missing a huge opportunity in terms of what you can leverage from that customer data, the intelligence represented in that data, and, number one, if you just think of intelligence as something you slice and dice, and you use it to develop more intelligent marketing offers, that's good, that's a great first step in terms of leveraging that customer data. But if you can then go ahead and leverage these real-time decisions and actually operationalize that in real time, that's even better.


"So this is all about making these crm systems more than just operational. It's about making them what I would call real-time systems. Intelligent systems that actually go ahead and deliver additional value above and beyond simply being data entry repositories."