I remember a CRM project that I worked on a few years ago. This was with a large enterprise company that had a large developer team, which had built some 50+ client applications for different business units over the previous 10-15 years.

All of these applications were related to customer interactions and they were each providing what a business unit needed at a given point in time. However, the company's growing challenge was simply how to orchestrate the business altogether, as all of these applications and data were isolated and not integrated.

Figure 7.1 best demonstrates the integrated CRM applications and processes:

Figure 7.1: Integrated CRM for business orchestration

In CRM implementations, the integration element is done by linking various software components, business processes, data elements, and application screens (frontends) together. As a result, this delivers a selection of new tools or enhances an existing functionality in order...