At last month's CIO Forum in San Francisco, I lead a round-table discussion about the strategic way to think about CRM applications and their evolution in the enterprise. While everyone agreed that the most comprehensive CRM systems were built (actually, assembled), not bought, one CIO took it a step further. What really matters in a CRM system isn't the system at all. It's the data.And in an enterprise of any real scale, that data won't ever live in any one system. It will be held in various CRM, call center, support, and Web systems. Even if these were all from the same vendor, the instances would be operating and managed fairly independently. Even with SaaS products (where by definition everyone is running the same code line), the data models and semantics used in the separate instances tend to drift apart. So the data will tend to be siloed unless there's strong governance to prevent it.To misquote James Carville, "it's the data, stupid." CRM features are important for users, but what matters to IT -- and the health of the business -- is the quality, validity, and usability of the data held in the customer-related systems. From this data-centric perspective, there are a range of new criteria of how CRM systems should be evaluated.