ACHIEVING CRM WITHOUT CRM | MICRO CLOUD SERVICES V0.1

Standish group International research [1] reveals 31.1% of major enterprise systems projects, including CRM, are cancelled before they ever get completed. Further research indicates 52.7% of projects cost 189% of their original estimates where, on the success side, the average is only 16.2% projects are completed to need, on- time and on-budgets.

Research suggests enterprises continue to grapple with the same digital transformation challenge now as over two decades ago when the Enterprise systems era hype took hold: how to unlock transformation by leveraging technologies which enable precise understanding of customer &\or service needs for more responsive high value service quality.

However, despite CRM’s troubled reputation, many are still seduced by the ‘silver-bullet syndrome’ trap of perceiving CRM to be the answer, yet are left bamboozled when heavy investments do not correlate to the desired return at the end than at the beginning.

Compounding matters, in today’s cloud-era, organisations now need digital formed from a complex mix of social media, cloud, big data, mobile and even IoT as key components to appeal to, maintain and expand their market, customer base and service relevance. Thus, are CRM applications ready to address the challenges in today’s modern digital world?

In short, and given the Monolithic Architecture of the traditional CRM, the answer is often no or seldom so at best.

Responding to this, the flexibility, cost-effectiveness, fitness and scalability of Micro-service cloud architecture, continues to revolutionise the digital and IT world.

Success with micro-cloud services, therefore, relies upon a strong, cohesive, engagement model between organisational participants and digital teams. Design thinking methods are used to construct roadmaps of need, benefit and outcome form digital journeys. As such, microservices architecture becomes then modular in form, supports recognition-based data quality and is evolutionary.

This creates benefits including:

· Flexibility – because all components are, in effect, their own discrete unit, it’s easier to adapt to circumstances and make changes, update a product with new technology, and rework parts of the software to suit Ux nuances.

· Decipherability – in a microservices environment, individual elements can be picked up by any organisational group, even those that have been under-served for many years, regardless of the stage of development. That’s not as easy with a monolithic architecture.

· Scalability – Since firms can scale individual parts of your software, for functional and strategic purposes as desired, this scales value more quickly, more precise to need and cost effectively.

· Adaptability – Ability to make change individual elements of your Ux & software; meaning organisations can quickly adapt to market changes, to reconcile and even anticipate strategic drift.

However, reliant on design thinking methods, it is an infusion of organisational and software engineering which focuses on bringing the accuracy or precision to the functional need with decomposing an application into single-function modules (with well-defined and highly valuable interfaces).

These modules can be independently deployed and operated by small teams, akin to a dev-ops environment, who own the entire lifecycle of the services they need to function and evolve.

With that in mind, Micro-cloud-services, being cloud in origin, however, need high performance infrastructures to tie in place and offer secure role-based access and performance to all the modules, user journeys, and data facilities.

Combined, these advantages really help organisations move forward in situations where the digital environment is complex, not fully formed &\or where committing to the investment in a fully-fledged distinct or traditional CRM may generate significant risk or exposure.

To achieve this, fundamentally, and from both a digital success and digital strategy perspective, a highly coordinated means of designing and standing up Micro-cloud-service systems enable firms to bring a closeness between strategy, human and functional need and the continuous assessment, monitoring and delivery of human centred digital strategy; that helps them answer”:

§ “What really is our digital strategy?

§ “What does our digital business really look like?”

§ “Does our business model make sense?”

§ “Does our strategic sense making approach fit?”

Indeed, where deep complexity exists in current-to-new digital strategy, coordinated engagement is absolutely key to success in forming digital foundations.

Accordingly, in the design of a digital or technological change programme, to reconcile or prevent strategic drift, each “leader” of change is able to utiise micro-services in the design process to deeply and fundamentally engage many stakeholders (again in a coordinated manner). Coordination avoids the risks of rogue operatives disrupting programme consistency, design and chaos.

By adopting a triple-loop approach (which alters paradigms) therefore, Kanban-operatives are able to step their respective organisations through a staged change diagnosis and design process to garner/leverage/raise:

1. Awareness – engage the organisation on why the change is needed and to determine how ‘really’ participants perceive the environment; and what evidence, ideologies &\or assumptions supports perceptions – which supports system design and configuration

2. Desire – Garner support and organisational participation in the change process

3. Knowledge – Acquire and deliver knowledge of how the organisation will change to be, itself, a body of change within with its greater environment. Create and galvanize the vision of the future

4. Ability – to provve, visualize, deploy and adjust &\or implement change, foster new skills and behaviours – without the investment risk of CRM

5. Reinforcement – Ability to design and sustain the change outcome(s) and processes; built upon positive reinforcement and corrective measures.

Micro-services, by linking and presenting data in a form discernable and meaningful to users (of all roles), and designed with a triple loop and highly participative engagement model, therefore, are about the ability to create and hold a healthy, and continuous, tension between the current paradigm and the ongoing vision – all essential and key features of successful and modern enterprise design for more assured digital success.

Read the full paper

Also published here