The good folks at php|architect saw fit to give me a few pages again, this time for an article about PHP and salesforce.com's awesome Force.com Platform-as-a-Service product. The article was a labor of love, though by the end it was more labor than love, as I found I wasn't entirely sure how to capture all the possibilities in just 4,000 words. But in any case, the article has been published and is available on newstands - you can get in here. Here's how it starts:
Once upon a time in a job far, far away, there was a firm that desperately needed a new way of doing things. For thirty years across seven different acquisitions, a dozen separate offices were using whatever means they could to manage their relationships with clients, vendors, and each other. In some offices, the staff still relied on paper order forms passed from the sales floor to fulfillment. Others managed nearly all their processes with email and an Excel® spreadsheet stored on a shared drive. Most offices were linked by some middle-office software for billing and account maintenance, but only a precious few in the company actually knew how to use it. The company was growing, but the staff was ill equipped to handle the load.Get the rest of the article in the November 2007 edition of php|architect.
Obviously, we needed some serious help in the software department, and fast! But finding software that matched our business and processes exactly would be nearly impossible; we were a people-centric business and so the software we needed would have to address all the concerns, procedures, and idiosyncrasies of those people. Worse still, the software would have to do this for the people in six different business functions: sales, fulfillment, billing, marketing, information technology and management reporting.
The theoretical answer to this conundrum is CRM software. Over the last couple of decades, CRM applications have evolved from glorified address books to massive data systems in as many flavors as there are people who use it. But if you’ve never worked with the development and deployment of CRM, it can be a real beast. So many stake-holders (with matching opinions) and so few developers quickly leads to paralysis. In the end, like many organizations we opted to purchase some expensive software that we modified extensively to meet our needs.
While purchasing the software gave us control of our own destiny, it also closed us off from the world. Sure this web-based application was scalable and extensible, but in order to do any work on it meant required proprietary knowledge of the software and our processes. And with so many cooks in the kitchen, the software at its best could only serve the lowest common denominator. Extensions had to serve everyone and all business units and departments had access to and had to know how to use everything in the software just to use the part they needed.
In retrospect, it could have been easier and cheaper if we’d not purchased the software. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers had been around for a while who’d be more than happy to take on the cost of hosting, managing and upgrading our software for us. The trade off then, however, was that our unique processes would have to fit within the mold of the software - a common but highly undesirable problem. At the time, the answer was to buy it. Today, the answer may very well be in a company called salesforce.com.
(Incidentally, the article is entitled "Use the Force.com, Luke." I apologize for this title. It was the result of shared exasperation and a looming deadline for both me and my editor, and by the end of it I don't think either of us really cared what to call the thing. Also, there is a misprint on the issue's cover, where the slug refers to it as CMS. This should read "CRM." The article's references are correct.)
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