I've written for years that it is impossible to make a product too easy to use. But the industry has proved me wrong, by making products that are so focused on easy that they encourage sloppy, unmaintainable system configurations. In the pursuit of something easy enough for mortals to use (and sales reps to demo), some cloud vendors are paving the way for a big mess a few months after deployment.
Everybody knows that complex technology needs documents and training materials so that developers can effectively use it. In the cloud, this need is magnified by the fact that developers have to work with several languages at once (HTML, JavaScript, XML, CSS, jquery, Ruby, PHP, SQL...the possibilities are endless). So developers need more docs, right?
In the spirit of David Letterman's occasional feature "Stupid People Tricks," it's time once again for a new list of errors that lead to corrupted CRM records. Past quizzes have focused on SysAdmins and consultants, but now it's time to find out how your users and their business policies can contribute to data pollution.
There's a phenomenon that economists describe as a "race to the bottom," where vendors compete by undercutting in price, which leads to a reduction in quality and service.
Year after year, the cost of disk space has plummeted. Since you can pick up a terabyte for $50, it's often seemed a false economy to be careful with storage.
Cloud consultants aren't that much different from the consulting and contracting firms that IT has used over the years. But the economics of cloud consulting are a whole bunch different from what the Big 5 firms were doing with SAP and Siebel. Thanks to the price points of cloud solutions (typically, a monthly fee) and the expectation of Web open systems (all I do is point and click, right?), behemoth consulting gigs are few and far between.
Last week, we covered <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/691732">how to evaluate code</a> that is developed to extend cloud applications. Now we're going to take a look at coding and system modification strategies that can make the system more fragile over time. Since CRM systems have requirements that seem to evolve endlessly, durability of your code is a key success factor to long-run success of these systems.
Cloud-based applications tend to focus the users' creative impulses on what the vendors are calling "declarative programming:" point-and-click specification of behavior, plus configurations, settings, rules, and formulas. These are good choices for ease of use, containing multi-tenant workloads, and testability. But if your cloud app has large user counts or sophisticated use cases, declarative development will take you only so far: soon enough, you'll be merrily coding in both the presentation layer (view) and the business logic (controller). In some cloud environments, you'll even be working directly with metadata and the transaction layer (model).
Cloud computing gives user organisations and IT alike the freedom of maneuvering and long-run flexibility that was never possible with traditional enterprise applications. However, that freedom makes for new levels of unpredictability when it comes to big deployments, and some new requirements for support.
CRM systems offer workflows, approval processes, and other business process enforcement features. But it's not always clear which feature you should use, and overly strict enforcement mechanisms cause big user satisfaction problems.
Fixing your CRM system and the sales and marketing organization will take some real time, and should be done in stages. Further, in both CRM and sales there's a serious talent shortage. Sure, there are people on the street -- but just try to find a truly great salesperson or SFDC wizard in New York or San Francisco. So you should grab the employees and consultants whenever you can find them, and expect to fix the software and organizational issues in parallel.
It's axiomatic that in software of any complexity, the ecosystem of plug-in products, tools, compatible APIs, and developer community can become really important. In certain software product categories, the importance of the ecosystem can swamp any feature advantage that an upstart product may have, leading to what economists call a natural monopoly.
As I've written previously, CRM systems are inherently the most political of Enterprise systems. Users' bonuses and even their career paths may be riding on the data values in the CRM system. Small errors in the data can mean big problems if leads are getting lost or sales reps can't see relevant information about their customers and prospects.
Offshoring IT work to India, China, Eastern Europe, and even South America has been a staple of IT cost reduction. And by definition the Cloud means location independence. Generally speaking, they're practically made for each other.
As I've written before, CRM systems are the most political of all enterprise software. This is because the sales and marketing users are inherently competitive and driven by incentives that make them even more so. In the drive for this quarter's compensation and eventual promotion, sales guys will fight for lower quotas and better territories, sometimes trying to grab deals from an inattentive colleague or channel partner. Whether in large organizations or small, this may be baked in as part of the sales culture.