
Noel Ady
Founding Partner & Lead Consultant
With so many off the shelf products, how do you decide when to create a custom 360 solution rather than buy one? Noel Ady, gravity9 Founding Partner & Lead Consultant discusses the challenges and possible solutions.
Whether to build vs buy digital products has divided opinion over the past 10 years especially, now that, more recently, we have so many more options available to us, via cloud platforms. The trend we are seeing, at present, is that organisations are preferring smaller, more specific, products and services to fulfil a variety of business needs; rather than buying one big product to provide a blanket solution.
Noel Ady, Founding Partner and Lead Consultant at gravity9 solutions discusses the five key challenges when buying a digital platform and, why, for a 360 solution you should always opt for a custom build.
At gravity9, we help organisations build strategic digital platforms and it’s what I’ve been doing for over twenty years. Quite often, these are built in the form of digital service layers with the customer 360 view platforms on top to help unify and serve multiple businesses, and departments enabling them to read and interact with data that may exist across multiple systems.
A common approach to building a 360 view often manifests as an implementation within (Customer Relationship Management) CRM product. Naturally, this feels like a logical a solution, as the sales pipeline is close to the customer journey and leads into additional services and functionality.
Organisations often feel more comfortable with the CRM product solution as it means no ‘custom development’, and early implementation, often, returns a number of key advantages such as out the box, reports, charts and simple editing screens.
The Challenges
If this is the case, why are we seeing so many organisations looking to replace CRM solutions with a custom solution? Let’s break down some of the key challenges with a CRM product, in order to support a 360 implementation.
- As previously mentioned, the early days with a new CRM system provide the things you need quickly and effectively. However, the problems arise later on. After months, maybe years, the business places additional demands on the platform and as a result, custom development can creep into a nice clean CRM system.
- A CRM solution is more often than not entity focused. This means you define some of custom entities in order to support your business needs. For example, if you are selling vehicles, you will likely have an entity configured to represent a vehicle or a sales agreement or a potentially a vehicle option entity. Some of these entities are well suited to a CRM process and some are just additional data. What’s the problem with this? I believe designing a system to the data is a fundamental flaw in engineering and will impact your long-term business needs. When you have entities designed, you effectively externalize the logic you apply to that data; you push the logic out to the side (plugins for example in a CRM solution). Over time this external code becomes replicated, convoluted and difficult to manage, ultimately, because the behaviour is a bi-product (or afterthought) to the data structure.
- The other observation we have seen in CRM solutions in place for some time is the more the CRM is customised, the less you get out the box (reports and screens) and the harder it is to upgrade. Heavily customized CRM implementation quite often requires a huge amount of effort to upgrade to the latest version, which is costly and time consuming.
- An area, often overlooked is the cost of custom development within a CRM product. CRM developers are usually in high demand and it’s a niche skillset, as many developers prefer writing software rather than restricted to the confines of an off the shelf product.
- As a result of the previous challenge, finding skilled architects in to work on the product can be very expensive. Simply sourcing architects to support and maintain what is already in place can be difficult, let alone build new features. When thinking financially you must remember; your CRM will have license costs as well. So, you pay for the software, you pay for the development and then you often pay for upgrade efforts due to customisation.
- When you build a 360 solution you often need your data to be pulled and organised in a way that enables you to showcase information on a single screen or set of screens. CRM solutions are good at holding entity information, but a 360 view requires a high volume of data from multiple sources. This increases the product’s data complexity and reduces performance. Centralising your customer / product or service data in a CRM means investing in heavy integration into the product. But, is this really the best place to hold all that data together? Surely, there more efficient and reusable ways to do this?