We've got a Salesforce implementation going at the nonprofit where I work. While there was some debate about which big CRM we'd buy, the need to consolidate was blindingly obvious.
Why? Because our organization has been quite forward thinking about allowing managers and executives to source the technology they think they to succeed. As this article advocates for, IT was largely consultative rather than dictatorial, and a lot of business units were able to pick what they wanted.
But what this has left us with is dozens of places where customer data was being stored, some of them now past their end of life. No central visibility into customer experience. People getting multiple copies of the same email from different departments using different email platforms. Poor deliverability. Subscriptions on random credit cards that suddenly turn off because the person left and no one knows how to get into the admin account and update the card.
We hired a boutique shop to do the Salesforce implementation; we're not scared of doing that. Unfortunately this time it did not pay off... their performance fell off, to the point that they couldn't even reply to emails on time. As sometimes happens with small firms, they grew too fast and exceeded their ability to operate. We can't wait for them to figure it out... so here we go with a big dog firm. Let's see how that goes.
Maybe I'm lucky in who I work with, but I find the "add a bullet point to the resume" take to be maybe a bit too cynical. Tableau, Salesforce, data lakes, ERP, identity management, and "cloud" infrastructure each seem like useful tools if implemented smartly. (Note that I took out blockchain...)
Your problem statement does make it sound like you need a CRM, but I do wonder why is has to be a big CRM with a big consultancy, and why IT aren't delivering it?
Who's going to run the thing afterwards? Will the bigdogs deliver something that you can maintain, or is that generally against their own interests?
Finally, who's gonna secure all this customer data? Are they taking that on as part of their remit? They rarely do.
I expect the significant discounts offered to NFPs has some bearing on this decision.
Having been involved in IT management of NFPs, the low price is a significant draw, and the total lack of internal skills is rarely able to counter this.
If you don't have some sort of architecture function, technical risk management, application management, and data management these projects simply won't deliver value.
The CRM needed to be sophisticated enough to accommodate high standards for data security and access control, several marketing integrations, and the complex data model that resulted from a permissive culture.
I'm NOT an expert but my understanding is that, in terms of complexity and cost, there's a whole tier above Salesforce where you're provisioning servers and installing Oracle or SAP. We didn't need and could not afford that.
And if you're thinking of smaller CRMs like Hubspot, Zoho, Sugar, Apptivo, or building one from scratch, well, we already had many of those. :-) Those are what Salesforce is replacing.
Our IT department is superb on metrics like security and availability. But they don't know Salesforce, and are not the right people to evolve the broader culture associated with data. The org hired a leader with experience doing this sort of thing, and he is building out an internal permanent Salesforce team which will own the thing after implementation is done.
I mean fair enough and I'm sure they are reasons, but from a very immature point of view it sounds like you could have just picked a winner from your current CRMs and consolidated, and had a system in place that arguably already works, lowering your risk.
Still, as an IT contractor, better you pay the big bucks for the projects. :p
An IT culture that's built their budget and staff around managing a datacenter with on-premise software lacks incentive to support cloud implementations.
Whilst true, the on-prem based implementations are usually insecure and manual as fuck, which largely means the IT function simply stopped learning.
Also, the move to cloud is largely driven by said IT teams failure to deliver much, you could a the CRM on-prem, but we know they'll likely take a few years to fail to deliver it.
One of the side-effects I'm seeing of GDPR is a stronger incentive to consolidate systems under central management. Companies that allowed different departments the leeway to control their own systems now find themselves literally not knowing how many different places a customer's data might live.
That was absolutely a factor in this decision. And it's not just GDPR, many states and even the federal government are likely to impose more regulation on how personal data is collected and stored.
Not necessarily. Another way of looking at it is that GDPR is forcing companies to eliminate a common dysfunction, while at the same time restricting their ability to play shenanigans with user data. The end result is companies that are more efficient at what they should be doing, and restricted from doing what they shouldn't be doing. A win-win.
(While many business people used to how things worked are unhappy with the changes, sometimes you really have to bludgeon a fix through the broken incentive structures that plague businesses.)
> Which in turn makes it easier to over analyse and identify user data, exactly what GDPR was meant to avoid.
GDPR "cares" about identifying user data - how else are you going to protect it and control access to it?
As for over analysing it (whatever that means), it really doesn't care too much about that as long as you have explicit meaningful informed permission from the user to do so, protect it properly, and let them control what happens to it (both during and afterwards).
Why? Because our organization has been quite forward thinking about allowing managers and executives to source the technology they think they to succeed. As this article advocates for, IT was largely consultative rather than dictatorial, and a lot of business units were able to pick what they wanted.
But what this has left us with is dozens of places where customer data was being stored, some of them now past their end of life. No central visibility into customer experience. People getting multiple copies of the same email from different departments using different email platforms. Poor deliverability. Subscriptions on random credit cards that suddenly turn off because the person left and no one knows how to get into the admin account and update the card.
We hired a boutique shop to do the Salesforce implementation; we're not scared of doing that. Unfortunately this time it did not pay off... their performance fell off, to the point that they couldn't even reply to emails on time. As sometimes happens with small firms, they grew too fast and exceeded their ability to operate. We can't wait for them to figure it out... so here we go with a big dog firm. Let's see how that goes.
Maybe I'm lucky in who I work with, but I find the "add a bullet point to the resume" take to be maybe a bit too cynical. Tableau, Salesforce, data lakes, ERP, identity management, and "cloud" infrastructure each seem like useful tools if implemented smartly. (Note that I took out blockchain...)