November closed with London’s first snow of the season and IntraLinks’ inaugural Client Symposium for Alternative Investments. The former slowed people down while the latter accelerated ideas on increasing investor satisfaction and reinvestment.

Clients from the Nordic and Alpine countries of Sweden and Switzerland made the trek to London to join their peers at the Symposium. In fact, four of Europe’s six largest private equity firms participated in the event. Not to be outdone, IntraLinks chief marketing officer Greg Kenepp and IntraLinks senior vice president of product management Wade Callison crossed the Atlantic to join the discussion.

An unseasonably wintery and very cold London played host on the 30th November to the Business Cloud Summit 2010, sponsored this year by, amongst others, IntraLinks, Microsoft, CSC, NetSuite, RightNow and Success Factors and attended by several hundred senior IT professionals, analysts and commentators drawn from a broad base of industries, the public sector, media and professional bodies.

This is the second year of the summit, one of the largest vendor independent cloud gatherings in the UK, a forum that serves the purpose of inter-industry networking as much as it reports out trends and discusses issues and, of course, provides a showcase for the propositions of the leading software authors and service providers in the space.

There are many business processes where the secure sharing of information across enterprises is required. Examples of these processes include strategic transactions, such as acquiring or divesting an organization, setting up sites for pharmaceutics clinical trials, managing contractor bids to develop an oil exploration project, and syndicating debt between multiple parties across the globe.

I used to see frequent reports and blog postings about the success or failure of CRM systems. Lately, however, I hear radio silence. Has this technology finally turned the corner and achieved consistent ROI, delivering on expectations?

Probably not. The most recent survey from CSO Insights showed no appreciable change in CRM adoption within the sales community of the companies surveyed. CSO measures adoption when 90% of the sales force consider a CRM system a "must have." Lamentably, only roughly 39% of companies surveyed achieved that criteria.

Arguably, as major creators of information in a customer relationship, sales' failure to adopt a CRM system means that system has failed. I know from personal experience that salespeople cannot be bullied, nagged or even incented to use a tool they don't want. So wherein lies the answer? I always look at the "What's in it for me" (WiifM) measure. I suspect that WiifM drives behavior much more than we would wish to believe, and certainly has more impact than encouraging salespeople to be good corporate citizens. And why not? Depending on the industry, a typical sales person has to close $10,000 of business per day, which tends to create laser-like focus on what works and what doesn't.