[•UTTERWORTH ~] E I N E M A N N 0268--4012(95)00005.-4 International Journal of Information Management, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 115-126, 1995 Copyright © 1995 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0268-4012/95 $10.(X) + O.(X) Organizational, Strategic and Technical Barriers to Successful Implementation of Database Marketing K FLETCHER AND G WRIGHT This paper evaluates the strength of perceived barriers to the adoption of database marketing (DBM) in the UK financial services sector. Using an obtained sample of 46 per cent of all major banks, building societies and insurance companies it is revealed that organizational and strategic barriers are seen as less important than technical barriers for both adopting and non-adopting organizations. This result, coupled with the low level of sophistication of current systems and the interest and importance of DBM to the majority of financial services organizations, suggests that current systems are unimpeded by organizational and strategic barriers. We argue that the future promise of more sophisticated DBM applications to give strategic advantage is thus likely to be compromised, due to the lack of an awareness, amongst our respondents, of the criticality of organizational and strategic barriers which are well documented in the literature. Keith Fletcher and George Wright are with the Strathclyde Graduate Business School, 199 Cathedral Street, Glasgow G4 0QU, UK. 1pARSONS, G L (1983) 'Information technol- ogy: a new competitive weapon' Sloan Management Review 25 (1) 3-13; MCFAR- LAN, F W (1984) 'Information technology changes the way you compete' Harvard Business Review 84 (3) 98-103; IVES, B AND LEARMOUTH, G (1984) 'The information system as a competitive weapon' Com- munications of the ACM 27 (12) 1193- 1201; PORTER, M E AND MILLAR, V E (1985) 'How information gives you competitive advantage' Harvard Business Review July/ August, 149-160 2GIBSON, C AND NOLAN, R (1974) 'Managing the four stages of CDP growth' Harvard Business Review January/February, 76-88; PRICE WATERHOUSE (1990) Price Water- house Information Technology Review Price Waterhouse, London; NOLAND, R (1979) 'Managing the crises in data proces- sing' Harvard Business Review March/ April, 115-126 3MUNRO, M C AND HUFF, L (1985) 'Informa- tion technology and corporate strategy' continued on page 116 Introduction For many years both practitioners and academics have been arguing that using information technology within an organization can bring substan- tial gains, l These gains initially arose through increased efficiency as back-office operations, such as accounting, stock control and wage processing were computerized but as organizations became more soph- isticated in their information systems then operations transferred to front-office applications, such as marketing. 2 The strategic use of information technology, compared with transaction processing or oper- ational control, has gained the most attention in recent business literature 3 perhaps because it has been shown that simply automating existing processes brings marginal savings of 10-20 per cent, while a more fundamental improvement to business practices can triple the return. 4 However, the initial enthusiasm for the strategic use of information technology (IT) has been reduced by evidence that IT can be a competitive burden 5 instead of giving competitive advantage, and that the advantage might not be sustainable. 6 There have been some well publicized failures in attempting to implement IT 7 such as Taurus, the London Stock Exchange computer project which was cancelled in early 1993 after 12 years of planning and a cost to the City estimated at £400 million. Such failures have focused attention on the problems of implementing IT. 115