Does your business fit the product, or does the product fit your business?

Does your business fit the product, or does the product fit your business?

Often I hear complaints from businesses owners and managers regarding solutions that they have purchased. Its normally the same type of complaints; "Its too complicated to use", "Its not flexible enough", "It doesn't fit our business needs any longer". Regardless of the fact of your current position, I'm sure that these sound very familiar.

In this day and age businesses are considered entities of constant change. Strong businesses are always exploring new methods and ways of working. I mentioned in a previous blog post that the growth is perpendicular to change.

A number of years ago you only really had 2 options as far as determining which was the correct product for your business. You either went off to a custom development house and got a bespoke application written that would directly cater for your needs, or, you purchased an "off the shelf" product that partially solved the main pain points that you and your businesses were experiencing.

Ultimately every business is looking for a product that is totally Dynamic, flexible and that can grow as the business grows. Coming from a development background, I have seen businesses go through pain and agony trying to make bespoke products fit their business processes. Projects that start of by focusing on remedying basic pain points end up costing an arm and a leg because they spiral out of control. Thank heavens I decided to leave the development to the really smart people :)

I have also seen businesses use "off the shelf" products and hammer their business processes into them. In my experience I have witnessed entire capture forms being used for data capture that is completely irrelevant to the specified form. I have seen reports with columns that have had the names scratched out and a new column name has been manually written in. Its completely crazy the lengths businesses IT departments will go to in order to gratify a user and save money.

Wouldn't it be AWESOME if there were products out there that acted as containers for business rules, business process and business relationships. It would be fantastic if these products were pretty much rule, process and relationship agnostic. Mr business owner / manager should be able to determine their own processes and rules, and these should be articulated from a functional point of view within a software package.

Welcome to the world of the configurable framework or customizable platform. Platforms and frameworks that contain the capacity and functionality that allow for the very mentioned rules, processes and relationships that your businesses rely on and cherish, to be translated to a reliable, accurate, functional, managed (that's a lot of adjectives) process within a software product. Business Driven Process Generation rather than IT driven process generation!

Moving from a world of custom code, tables, referential integrity, primary keys and "do you have a field in the table that will cater for the edit box (Delphi Lingo) in the UI?" to a world of front end configuration has been an absolute dream for me. I don't need to go into SQL any more and mess around with the backend! the only queries I write now days are related to fairly complicated SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) reports.

These platforms have enabled and empowered people that understand processes, rules and relationships, from a business perspective, to generate all of these from a functional perspective and lay the foundations for the developers to fill in the gaps.

In my experience, a prime example of a Dynamic framework that is both extensive and simple, at the same time, is Dynamics CRM. It is no longer considered just CRM (Customer Relationship Management) but XRM, which means Extended Relationship Management. The focus is no longer just on the customer, but on any sort of relationship you can think of. The relationship between a driver and a vehicle, a facility and a building, an asset and a component, and so much more, can be created and managed using the XRM functionality.

The product, Dynamics CRM (XRM), is always difficult to explain to people as it is just so diverse. It has been used in many different businesses to resolve many different issues. I have come up with a short blurb that helps me explain, in short, what CRM (XRM) is. Here you go : "Dynamics CRM is a fully integrated customer relationship management suite that consists of 3 major modules; Sales, Services and Marketing. The product is governed by user roles and permissions, and automated by workflow, business process flows and business rules. The Dynamics CRM framework can be fully extended using the XRM functionality that is provided with the out the box product."

To all members of any type of business out there. Please, never forget to ask the question posed in the title of this article... Does your business fit the product? or does the product fit your business? You are a dynamic entity that is full of growth and aspirations. Make sure the product you select to support this growth fits the rules and processes you have put in place to facilitate this growth!