So despite the fact that Fleet, the seventh largest financial holding company in the United States, had purchased a lot of extra licenses from Siebel, Christensen made the decision to go with a small, targeted application. Fleet invested just over a million dollars on the MarketSoft lead management product. The navigational tool operated on rules that each of Fleet's business unit managers could customize and change over time. In contrast, the Siebel lead management module was based on rules hard-coded into the system, as they are in most enterprise suites. If Christensen had needed changes or customization, she would have had to call in a programmer.

Furthermore, the MarketSoft product required less business process change than Siebel's and had the potential to pay for itself in a year, at a time when Fleet was hurting financially (revenue was down 27 percent and profits were down 76 percent in 2001), says Christensen, now a freelance CRM consultant in Andover, Mass. "I was able to target the investment to match the revenue and enable a best-of-breed solution versus going with a CRM suite that had anymore business processes that I'd have to implement or take out, and I didn't want to do that," she explains. Using MarketSoft "was an example of a laser-focused implementation to meet the economic need."

Siebel executives say Fleet would not have gone in that direction if there had been a match between the company's enterprise objectives and business decisions further down the line. "Fleet had made a huge commitment to Siebel at an executive level, but that didn't translate down," says Siebel's Carter. "At the business level, they were focused on a very narrow piece of functionality - they were looking specifically for lead management and not a broader enterprise solution."

Most CIOs, however, are searching for just these kinds of lower risk, quicker return investments. "[CIOs are] all looking for limited risk investments with payback in a year's time," Christensen says. "Today, CIOs are looking at ways to invest only in what they need to deliver fairly certain results."

The Web Services Glue

CIOs who have the benefit of a clean slate can avoid some of the big three-letter application suites from the get-go. At Cubist Pharmaceuticals, a Lexington, Mass.-based biotech company that develops antimicrobial drugs that fight life-threatening hospital infections, IT Director Kelly Schmitz is creating a flexible architecture that will support the company's current financial systems and also its future sales, data warehousing, clinical trial management and CRM systems. And he sees Web services - not enterprise application suites - as the way to accomplish that.