Michael Maoz

I am writing a series of research pieces with some colleagues at Gartner on Customer Centric Web Strategies. What we are focused on is the hodgepodge of applications that most organizations have cobbled together to serve customers. Portals, order entry, inventory, chat, email, pricing, marketing content, search, customer service knowledge bases: a mess of data models, from a dozen vendors, writing to different development environments. There is practically no business process software to guide interactions across applications.

This is treating your customers like house guests you are trying to get rid of: don’t replace the towels, give them left overs, and stay away a lot. They’ll get the picture. Meanwhile, we are building up enterprise application suites for the back office. Most of us are deploying, or have deployed, integrated ledger/financials/HR/Sales automation/Inventory as suites from a single vendor serving our own employees.

Where are these large and mid-sized focused business applications vendors when it comes to delivering an integrated website application? Most of us are ten to 12 years into our websites. That isn’t a long time. But it is time to take stock of where we need to go now. Where are these applications in their evolution to software as a service or meeting the criteria of Cloud Computing? Are any of the vendors likely to develop a suite of applications that are customer centric web applications?

In the meantime, we force our customers and partners and prospects to use websites that are woven from multiple applications, that are hard to navigate, and inflexible to change rapidly based on user input. It’s been a good start, and it’s time to look to the next phase.