When we think about the term "relationship", we most often think about it being dyadic: spouse-spouse, doctor-patient, parent-child, etc. Some of us (like sales people) may have so many relationships that we need to systematically record our experiences and data about them. Various software programs emerged in the 1990s to assist with this task: Act!, Maximizer, Goldmine, Lotus Organizer, MS-Outlook, etc.

But in modern society, we also have relationships that involve organizations, either with individuals, or with other organizations. When organizations have relationships, they generally need some sort of "system" to manage them. That's where relationship management systems come into play. These systems allow organizations to stereotype their interactions with people and with other organizations, and to organize the planning, conducting, recording, summarizing, and evaluating of these interactions according to the role of the person in the organization who is having the interaction.

This has many beneficial effects for the organization. For example, the activity of selling used to be organized so that a sales person had a territory, and visited all the potential customers in that territory to form relationships with them. Now, sales activities tend to be located in call centres. A potential customer has no relationship with the person on the other end of the phone, the relationship is with the organization as a whole: the people are interchangeable within a certain role (the customer service rep role).

So you can see that effective relationship management systems allow organizations to have relationships with stakeholders that emulate the features of a "real" interpersonal relationship. This usually involves presenting to any individual within a role a summary of the interactions the organization has had previously with an individual, so that every individual in a role can behave as if they personally participated in those interactions.

In the 1990s, many different systems grew up to fill this market need. Perhaps the quintessential example was a system called Siebel, later purchased by Oracle Corporation. The current system that is dominating the space is an online application called Salesforce.com. In the open-source universe, the leader of the pack is a system called CiviCRM, which was born out of the Howard Dean campaign in 2004.