>>>I don't remember too many flops,
>>The dirty little secret in my business - back office applications - is that 90% of the BOM applications that are begun fail, and an equivalent number of CRM applications fail.
>>That, despite the fact that most intelligent VARs clearly cite those numbers to the client before beginning the applications.
>>I never figured out why that's the case.
>>I just stopped selling them, no matter how much the prospect asks me to.
>
>Having never quite written the latter, we did, however, have success with BoM stuff - because the clients who needed them, needed them badly and were serious about implementing them. One actually got the ISO 9000 certificate based on the paperwork generated by the app. So I don't quite get why those fail.
>
>But for CRM... it's like a framework, not really an app. It does very well what it was designed to do - to automate its creator's business, mirroring his processes. The few CRMs I saw generally sucked in that respect, being too sales oriented or management oriented while not giving me enough tools to do what I need to. The last one on the list, the allegedly open-sourced Sugar, goes to lengths to redefine its pages with the latest javascript fads every 3-4 years, adds unneeded gadgets, and now
>- I can't see any text longer than 255 without an extra click
>- can't copy text from it without automatically entering the edit mode, which then removes the plain html with an editbox, which is of insufficient size, so scroll once more
>- can't find many clients because their search is always xyz% instead of %xyz%, but it requeries every second - fast and useless
>- it logs all emails sent from it but doesn't automatically tag them as belonging to the client to whose worker's it was sent
>
>These things may work perfectly, if you're willing to shape your operations as a clone of the authors'.


Can't say about BOM but my suspicion with CRM was that salespeople were reluctant to let management see everything about their prospects.
Salespeople turn over quickly. I can see how they'd think that leaving a trail of prospects at the last employer might not be in their interest.