Be wary of consensus. With all these voicesin the evaluation process - enthusiasts, cynics,consultants - it might seem impossible to reach adecision. Surprisingly consensus often comes too easily, andyou should fret if the evaluation committee arrives at aunanimous opinion. It means either they're going with theeasy, safe choice or a clique within the committee has takenover, and everyone who's miffed about it is sulking. "If thebusinesspeople [on an evaluation committee] aren't emotionalabout this, I wonder if the project is worth it," MerrillLynch's Balliet says.

It's a tricky balance. A good evaluation will include heated debateover how to approach something like CRM, but that debate can just aseasily tangle itself into a skein of internal politics that bring downthe project.

That was happening to Ginsburg's billing project, but ultimately hearbitrated compromise and today he considers the project a success: Itwas on time and on budget.

The Golden Rule: KISS. Keep It Simple,Stupid. It sounds blatantly obvious. But as long as thereare grand software failures, it's worth repeating: Smallerrollouts succeed more often than bigger ones. Applicationsthat do a few things yield better results than those thattry to do everything.

Partners HealthCare's Pieper is so committed to the KISS principlethat he no longer listens to vendors unless they limit their pitch tothe five tasks he wants to accomplish with CRM. "You should be saying,'I want to start fairly simple, see how it works, and if I like it andit produces the results I need, then I will expand horizontally andvertically," says Pieper. "If it doesn't, then it was just a smallexperiment that didn't cost me too much."