Comment Re:CRM [ ] (Score 1) 233
I'm a Siebel developer at a major financial institution, and we actually have a fantastically successful Siebel implementation that's been up for 4 years now.
Siebel is certainly not perfect, but if it's implemented correctly, it's much better than all the failed projects or bad experiences would have you believe.
There are 3 main problems with most Siebel implementations:
1) Many times, Siebel (or frankly, any CRM solution) is not implemented to support a well-planned, solid business process. Siebel does not provide a business process. It only supports what you already have in place. In many cases, Siebel is hacked up and forced into supporting a loose framework of existing "ways things are done". What you end up with is a mess that doesn't do anything but expose system flaws that nobody realized were there before.
2) Many Siebel implementations suffer from poor optimization and infrastructure scalability problems. Lots of companies throw lots of $$$ at Siebel to get flashy "important" functionality implemented, but don't stop to think about the hardware and networks gthe system runs on.
Now if you combine #1 and #2, you have a huge problem. Say that your "process" dictates that you should have 150 data elements crammed into one place (when 10 would do, if you stopped to think about it) and your infrastructure can only serve up about 20 at a time before your network starts to seize up or your web servers run out of threads or your database indexes start freaking out. You're screwed.
The 3rd thing that kills most Siebel implementations, in my opinion, is over-customization. Siebel is a COTS package that provides a boatload of vanilla functionality. Siebel provides a proprietary IDE that allows developers to go in and custmoize everything about the application. If you don't have good developers and good project planning, you can really hose up the application but good. Siebel has all kinds of things that happen in the background, and the minute you start screwing around under the hood, you run the risk of monkeywrenching the whole thing.
So...anyway...like I said, Siebel's not perfect, but it does get a bad rap a lot of times.
Siebel is certainly not perfect, but if it's implemented correctly, it's much better than all the failed projects or bad experiences would have you believe.
There are 3 main problems with most Siebel implementations:
1) Many times, Siebel (or frankly, any CRM solution) is not implemented to support a well-planned, solid business process. Siebel does not provide a business process. It only supports what you already have in place. In many cases, Siebel is hacked up and forced into supporting a loose framework of existing "ways things are done". What you end up with is a mess that doesn't do anything but expose system flaws that nobody realized were there before.
2) Many Siebel implementations suffer from poor optimization and infrastructure scalability problems. Lots of companies throw lots of $$$ at Siebel to get flashy "important" functionality implemented, but don't stop to think about the hardware and networks gthe system runs on.
Now if you combine #1 and #2, you have a huge problem. Say that your "process" dictates that you should have 150 data elements crammed into one place (when 10 would do, if you stopped to think about it) and your infrastructure can only serve up about 20 at a time before your network starts to seize up or your web servers run out of threads or your database indexes start freaking out. You're screwed.
The 3rd thing that kills most Siebel implementations, in my opinion, is over-customization. Siebel is a COTS package that provides a boatload of vanilla functionality. Siebel provides a proprietary IDE that allows developers to go in and custmoize everything about the application. If you don't have good developers and good project planning, you can really hose up the application but good. Siebel has all kinds of things that happen in the background, and the minute you start screwing around under the hood, you run the risk of monkeywrenching the whole thing.
So...anyway...like I said, Siebel's not perfect, but it does get a bad rap a lot of times.
