Autor: Matthias Trier

Communities of Practice are an important instrument of knowledge management, as they allow transferring expertise to remote business problems. Focussing on community facilitation and IT, this article assembles necessary requirements for community software and proposes a better support of social processes of knowledge work.

CRM manages customer interactions in marketing, sales and service. Based on an empirical survey the barriers for product configuration software to support the sales process in the automation industry are presented. In this industry, CRM systems are currently primarily employed for the optimization of after-sales services.