Integration is the corporate lodestone, not only within the CRM
install but across the entire network. The enterprise network can be a
far-flung chain nowadays, reaching to its regional and global
outstations, its outsources, its vendors, contractors, and other third
parties, all of whom, whether stakeholders or not, have some material
effect on the value chain.
Dovetail Software is famous for calling the area of customer service and support the
Forgotten Space,
much neglected within business thinking. Equally neglected is the area
of logistics operations, which is often far from the focus of executive
planning. Despite the burgeoning effort to integrate and enhance the
computing environment enterprise-wide, logistics as a whole within
modern business still lags.
“Consultant News reported that there are specific
reasons for lack of progress including a lower level of alignment
between respondents’ supply chain strategy and their business strategy,
lack of executive visibility and accountability, and the inability to
collaborate and share best practices across the extended enterprise.
Forty-three percent of respondents (down from 49 percent in 2005) said
supply chain strategy is aligned with corporate strategy. And, 43
percent (down from 56 percent in 2005) reported their strategies were
reviewed formally every year.” – Firms showed little progress toward overall supply chain goals, CSC survey shows
Not all companies neglect their logistics
operations, however, and within the scope of upgrade and integration
are success stories that involve Dovetail. We’ve mentioned a company
that upgraded its Amdocs Clarify install using Dovetail CRM, thin-client applications. (see Top Ten Reasons to Switch from Clarify to Dovetail).
Dovetail’s architecture and extensibility made it easy for the company
to customize the logistics application. Adoption of the .NET
development platform, and using Dovetail web services, allowed IT to
custom-create a logistics system that served their requirements to
greater advantage than they could find out of the box from any vendor.
The
additional premium that IT reaps from the open design standards and
extensibility of Dovetail products is that the core Clarify database
becomes useful again. Furthermore, integration, which results in
interoperability between different systems and departments, brings a
harvest of extra knowledge to the organization.
Knowledge,
and the agility that knowledge brings, is the true value proposition
driving integration. The power of software is revealed strongly from
the integration effort, which delivers multiple rewards in the same way
that the rising tide floats all boats. Developing a custom logistics
system brings intelligence to the supply chain, and the whole value
chain when used for both inbound and outbound logistics. This
intelligence, within the kind of architeture and flexibility that
Dovetail delivers, can spread into the CRM
system, offering improved customer support for fulfillment, for
example, and into analysis, offering real-time data for executive
decision-making.
IT has a special challenge with
integration: technological lines of demarcation within the enterprise
will often not be the same as its internal departmental and
institutional boundaries
“Business subjects (such as end-to-end processes or
customer segments) do not have a direct IT implementation. Systems link
business and technology. Focusing on systems lets business and IT talk
about the same things.
“It is very hard to establish ownership for systems
that are shared across departments. Shared systems are appealing from a
design viewpoint and because they make the best use of resources, but
these advantages can be dwarfed by ownership problems.
“To avoid this, fit systems within the organisational
structure, and do not cut across it. If the business chooses to run
sales and marketing as two separate departments, then split systems
along these lines so that they can be owned. You can maintain a single
design view across both systems, but implementing a system across an
organisational divide will fail.” From Long-lived systems: ownership
