One major development within business practice is the increasing interest in customer relationship management (CRM) in recent years. CRM thereby focuses on establishing and maintaining profitable relationships with the customer using modern information technology (IT) and has emerged as a major research field in business and information systems engineering. However, despite huge investments many CRM projects fail to achieve their objectives as the complex and interdisciplinary nature of CRM is not addressed adequately. In fact an adoption of a customer-centric orientation within a value-based management requires not only a cross-functional integration of different business departments but also a selectively adjusted collaboration of those departments. The paper provides an overview of the state of the art of CRM in literature as well as current practices in companies. Furthermore it outlines the specific challenges of a value-based CRM for the cross-functional integration and collaboration of marketing, financial management, and IT. Thus, in addition to a mutual alignment of marketing and IT, a value-based analysis, planning, and controlling of CRM-activities requires the development and implementation of standardized performance measurements and their adequate IT-support. Copyright Gabler Verlag 2010
