In my piece where I commented about the Business Case for SaaS, I made mention of the need to treat a SaaS implementation in the same way you would any other IT project and in particular paying attention to data.
Earlier today I received a paper from Fujitsu that adds a little more colour to this issue. They say:
Time and again we have seen clients lured into believing that they can have a fully functional business application implemented and delivering benefits within as little as five days. While we are strong advocates of the significant time savings that a SaaS option delivers, we think it’s time for a healthy dose of realism. It is technically true that SaaS applications can be running within a matter of days but it is simply wishful thinking to believe that all of the people, process and information flows required by even a moderately complex set of business processes can be adequately accounted for and reflected in the configuration of a SaaS application within a single business week.
Take as an example the experience of one of our clients, a large insurance brokerage. A major division within the business wanted to implement a comprehensive system to help manage the full scope of sales and customer interaction. The client was sold on a 20-day “quick start” implementation of Salesforce.com to achieve this.
When they came to us to help implement their 20-day plan, we were happy to oblige, but raised questions about key aspects of the plan that seemed to be missing. There was scrupulous attention paid to implementing the application itself, but very little regarding how data would be transitioned to the new system, much less its impact on the working practices of the team that would use it…
…The anti-climactic result was that our client learned the hard way that ignoring the full scope of what’s required to really improve sales and customer interaction yields only limited success.
The person who sent the report said that in many ways it was stating the obvious. That’s true if you’re steeped in IT stuff but less so when you’re not familiar with IT requirements. Imagine what it would be like if you were trying to implement a full accounting suite at anything other than a green field site?
The same is not true at the SME end of the market where 5 days might be considered more than enough. But that recognition simply points up the different requirements among different sizes and types of business.
Taking the case of Salesforce.com (and CRM more generally) – one size can fit all – but not in the implementation phase. When I attend Dreamforce later this month, this is a question I’ll be raising. Just how does a company like Salesforce.com encourage its resellers and implementers to adopt business specific appropriate practices?
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