Mission creep - When good products become bad suites

About 20 years ago, I spent a short period at University in the US as part of an educational exchange program. I was sent to a small town in the Midwest and got to stay in some nice residence halls, with rooms that had cable TV and a telephone. Meanwhile, my opposite number visiting the other way got to stay in my cramped, freezing room in a mining village in South Wales, where if you wanted to use the telephone, you had to queue up with everyone else in the street to use the phonebox (incidentally, the same phonebox that Tom Jones used to call London for news in his early career, not that it is any consolation when it is tipping it down with rain, which in South Wales it is nearly all the time).

In the midwestern town where I studied, McDonalds was trialling its short-lived and wildly unsuccessful attempt to sell pizza. I did try it and even as someone uneducated in the finer points of US pizza, I knew it was a wrong-un. Myself and my classmates sat shaking our heads. "Stick to what you do best" seemed to be the consensus. It's a lesson that McDonalds has since heeded unevenly.

It's hardly a trend to see vendors in the former WCM market re-directing themselves towards providing Experience Management tools in their products; we've spoken and written about it extensively during 2012 both in blogs and within our WCXM research. The challenging thing for technology buyers with this trend -- even if you have the organizational maturity to use the additional functionality -- is making a judgement on how well these super-sized suites are integrated together.

During a recent evaluation, I was looking at such a suite: a perfectly competent WCM product that had embraced the whole gamut of possible experience tools. Alas, ambition had over-reached common sense. In embracing everything from e-commerce to marketing automation via targeted multi-variance, it had introduced a new set of shiny but wholly unintegrated mini-silos of user information, each underpinned by a slightly different schema.

Unless you were planning to make extensive use of an external system -- such as a CRM platform -- to sync these mini-silos, then however well-featured the suite appeared, much of it was unusable in any sort of practical manner.

As we've noted with the increasing prevalence of Salesforce, when the scope of a vendor's offerings increases, quality does not always remain in step. The widening scope is not some sort of altruism. It's to make more parts of your organization wholly dependent upon the core CRM platform. If you don't have to leave the walled-garden of Salesforce for say, a best-of-breed WCXM package, then all the better for that dependence. Even if that WCXM product isn't very competent, it's another line-of-business whose data lives in the CRM. You become less of an Salesforce customer, but a Salesforce "shop."

McDonalds didn't want their customers to have a night off and visit the next-door Pizza Hut. So they offered pizza. It was horrible and it failed. Is it that we're savvier at buying pizza than we are technology?


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Gil, Partner, Cancentric Solutions Inc.
iStudio Canada Inc.

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