For many years Customer Relationship Management has been the order of the day - enabled by many excellent software solutions such as Siebel, Microsoft CRM and Salesforce. But who are the relationships actually between?

I have spent most of my working life in the HR Software business and the issue within HR is how to make HR more strategic - and from a system point of view, how to gain competitive advantage from your HR data?

Several years ago, the company I lead built a fully integrated HR and CRM application which aimed to answer both of these questions by identifying that the relationships with customers are actually between your people and your customer’s people. Initially, this project started from the premise that both CRM and HR solutions share a large amount of common functionality (bulk mail, workflow, customisation etc).

From humble beginnings then, my ideas around Stakeholder Management Software were born. Expanding beyond the idea that people are the real connection between you and your customers, this now includes suppliers, partners and other interested parties.

Social and Mobile technologies are a great enabler for this and we’ve been using PODIO as a platform to build on the idea and create a collaborative environment which encourages partnerships between you, your team, your partners and clients. Managing your people, sales and projects in a simple and effective way which can adapt to meet your needs as they change.

Other solutions are possible - how about checking the suitability of staff for a client project from your mobile device and all from within the Project Management / CRM / HR solution!

In one easy step, this concept adds strategic value to HR and builds a framework to really manage the real relationships with your customers (i.e. between your people and their people).