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I remember being at Oracle AppsWorld in 2001 in New Orleans (always a dangerous place for conferences, you lose half the audience the 2nd day) and Larry Ellison said on the mainstage, “Our CRM software meets your needs 80% out of the box. For the other 20% you should change your processes to fit our software.” He caught hell in the press, but he did have a point. Over customization was giving CRM a horrible name.

I’m glad to hear companies are swinging in the other direction. Vendors have invested a lot of time and resources in building out vertical versions of the software so less customization is required. But, as David points out, you know your core business better than your software vendor, and some customization is required every time.

I am hopeful that componentized architecture will make customizatons and extensions easier to create and maintain. But, there aren’t references yet for that…yet. Hopefully they will come along soon.

KB spending is down in 2007, according to my spending surveys. I think it is becoming (if it is not already) a commodity. That means it is ripe for an open source alternative. But it is going to take a true expert to architect it. And I nominate you David!

Thanks for bringing this topic up!

I’m watching customers go through multi-year planning cycles for major CRM system upgrades. So many of them were burned in the past by customizing packaged applications to the point of unrecognizability (and, more to the point, unsupportability.) So now I see the pendulum swinging too far the other way as they contort their business processes to keep completely out-of-the-box.

The irony is, with the development of the infrastructure you describe in a later posting, smart customization is much safer than it was in the “bad old days.”

But I think the real match between business and IT needs can come from component-based open source systems. These will likely be different from Sugar and its ilk, designed more as a framework of components and plug-ins than a packaged application that just happens to be open source.

We’ll see. And we’ll see which IT departments have the vision and skill to actually pull off something like this.

–David

ps – why are there no good open source knowledgebases? There are a million content management systems, and CRM, and search, but…no one seems to have put it all together. dbk