Since the beginning of the information age there has been a struggle between IT and, well, everybody else in the corporate infrastructure. The fact is that most business managers don't understand what the average IT person does, nor do they want to try to. This leads to understaffed and overworked IT staff and a large chasm between IT and other departments. I remember years ago there was an article in an IT industry magazine that predicted that sometime in the near future, this was probably 10 years ago, that businesses would conduct IT merger strategies the same way they do financial merger strategies. When a business prepares to merge, or absorb another, they do piles of research to determine the best way to merge the financial structure likes how you keep books, etc.
The thing that always got missed by number crunchers was how well the merger would proceed from an IT perspective. In other words, what will sales use as their sales and tracking system? Would the company adopt Microsoft Word 2000 (r) across the firm, or another version already being used by what will be a majority of the company. What servers would the new firm use and why? This failure to analyze the IT infrastructure for mergers lead to a VERY large, publicly funded and traded, firm I knew using MS Word, SalesForce and even, at some company locations, NOTEPAD, to track sales leads!! Absurd, not possible you say! That's what I use to think too.
I predict that systems that satisfy both the marketing managers as well as the coders at the firm will dominate the new millennium. Web-based systems have made incredible leaps in the past four or five years to increase the ability for business to exchange data from in-house systems, manage the data remotely, but there remains one big factor in the decision to move to online systems. The ingrown fear of data security, and that's not to say that this should not be a consideration, but the fact is that there will always be some percentage of business managers that will not move to online systems, so new millennium management system must also be flexible in the sense that they can be Web-based, and also available as a downloadable purchase.
Very, very few management systems meat all these requirements, but I know of one that is a diamond in the rough that offers all these features. This system is available as a download for your server, or as a Web-based online application. If you are a ColdFusion (r) coder-type firm, then you can easily add many of your own code, AND, it is easy for your marketing managers to use. It is also fully integrated with Google Analytics, which is a huge plus. I can honestly say that I spent the better part of my two decades working in the technology industry looking for this particular solution.