Back in the mid 90s in one of my other companies (PROSYS Business Solutions) we looked hard for a CRM product that would link our business together seamlessly. Such integration was a near impossible task back then and we inevitably compromised, eventually buying ONYX software as it was the only CRM product we could find that supported service and sales management in the same platform. What a novelty it was to be able to do that!

However our vision was for more than that and we strove constantly to push for what we wanted. It seemed so simple to us: a single, unified interface where we could access ALL the information and transactions relating to customers, staff, products and services within our business. We’re not claiming prescience: it just seemed to make so much common sense. Why input essentially the same data into several different systems – why not capture it once and update the underlying systems? Why go into CRM for sales and service information and then into Finance software for accounting information? Why chase around the various file servers looking for a letter you sent months ago – why not have all the files mapped onto the customer they related to and have a search function go get it for you?

CRM though, at that time, was a long way away from that Holy Grail being in most cases little more than glorified contact management.

Jump ahead ten years and how has the landscape changed? Well, CRM software has come of age in that it is now very function-rich in an application sense and now that we see the really big players in the marketplace such as Microsoft and Sage joining the fray it might just be possible that the technology will deliver on its promises.

But will it, indeed can it, ever address that fundamental functionality gap by offering a true integration platform for business?

The answer is more complex than a straight yes or no of course. If you were to go down the all-Microsoft route or all-Sage route and married their CRM offerings to their finance offerings then arguably you would begin to come close. But not, it has to be admitted (even by these software behemoths) without a huge amount of development resource. Out of the box CRM enterprise integration is not an option at present and is unlikely to be one anytime soon.

The rise and rise of the hosted CRM solution is also muddying the waters. To quote AMR Research, the market for hosted CRM is expected to continue to grow strongly. In an informal end-user survey last year, AMR analyst Rob Bois found that small and midsize businesses were a large part of the market, but he also found that bigger enterprises also were exploring software as a service.

"Larger companies are now seeing hosted CRM as a way to put the application in a single department to try it out, and then roll it out to the rest of the enterprise later," he said.

Also compelling is that hosted CRM can be put in place quickly, and requires fewer I.T. governance mechanisms, Bois added.

This rapid application deployment for niche departmental functions is welcome in many organizations as it allows a huge amount of autonomy for the specific project team yet frees the IT staff to deal with their more strategic objectives. CRM and project management are two applications that are benefiting from this emerging trend.

Yet it still does not plug the fundamental gap in CRM software and in the approach to CRM as an enterprise-wide software solution.

We solved our problem in the mid 90s ourselves. Our first pass was to develop middleware that we could run on client PCs. This was clunky though and difficult to deploy and manage (client-side software is always fraught with difficulty). The advent of the browser changed that however. Browsers were essentially “free” clients and so the concept of using the browser to act as the common interface took hold. We rapidly converted our code to ASP and grasped the concept firmly of an Enterprise Portal. This early development has become our own iport portal software product, now in its third iteration as version 3.

So what is beyond CRM?

Most independent analysts are now producing hard evidence to suggest that the true Enterprise Portal is what is beyond CRM. A highly functional, customizable, low-cost, high ROI interface through which the organization can transact with the world. Enterprise portals require different thinking however from the CRM software in a box concept. The edges between packages become blurred and there is a need to focus on what people do and need to do within the organization rather than on what the software they currently use allows them to do. The starting point for any enterprise portal project is to redefine the word “Customer” – in essence to reclaim it from the Customer Relationship Management acronym of CRM. You see, a customer of an enterprise portal is anyone who uses it: staff, management, executives, existing customers, new customers, stakeholders, suppliers…it can be a long list. And for each customer there needs to be a secure role and permissions based access mechanism. These roles and permissions need to extend into the heart of the enterprise software systems so that a supplier accessing the portal gains a completely different experience from a member of staff.

This is where the portal approach scores: the problem with CRM software in general and with hosted CRM applications in particular is that their usefulness to the organization diminishes through the lifecycles of the data being processed. In a system such as salesforce.com, the customers are stored as prospects only: to tie that through to the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems of the organization is a major challenge. When you get right down to it, as far as processes go the sale stops for salesforce.com when the customer signs the order…but it is only just starting for the customer at that point!

The industry agrees it seems. Here’s Robert Bois again: "CRM isn't necessarily going away," said Bois. "We still see a lot of spending happening around customer management processes in terms of applications and technology that can support various processes that address customer management." As much as 28% of CRM implementations failed completely in the past because implementations were difficult and traditional CRM ended at the point of capture of customer data, he said. "Obviously that's not where a customer experience ends," said Bois. "The customer has to go through an order fulfillment process."

There is no doubt of course that there is an important place for the hosted CRM model and products like salesforce.com and iportinstant CRM solutions do deliver benefits and do produce a return on investment. However it is only by tying all the processes together, by unifying the experience, that true Relationship Management can happen for all Customers of the systems. Our direct experience is that organizations will use our hosted portal solution iportinstant to test the waters or pilot the solutions before committing to a fully blown enterprise portal instead of a mere CRM solution.(see related article on Anadarko's use of an iportinstant project management portal)

Portal software is strongly placed to help enterprise and small businesses alike exploit the processes and systems inherent in their business model. Buying CRM, either on demand as in the salesforce.com model or as an application purchase from the likes of Microsoft or Sage is a “keep-up-with-the-Joneses” decision. Buying into the portal model brings back the key business differentiator of innovation. The chance to develop innovative approaches to how you deal with your customers, all customer of your portal, and letting you set the bar so high to entry that customers simply will not want to go elsewhere. Innovation in software products has a very short shelf-life – innovative use of enterprise portal software however produces dramatic changes in business performance and even culture leading to new strategies for exploiting opportunity. The bottom line is that CRM stores customer data – the enterprise portal turns that data into knowledge.

Chic McSherry
CEO
iport4business