I went to an event for Salesforce yesterday to do some research on implementing it as our CRM solution, and I met a consulting company that works on integration and implementation of the Salesforce platform. The rep mentioned a blog post on the Clear Task blog about “self-implementationitis”. The author gave the symptoms and solutions for curing the ills that come with self-implementation of a system.

We’ve been dealing with our CRM for nearly a year, and from what I understand, the aviation industry as a whole is plagued with CRM failure and stalling. Our biggest need is the ability to “fly the fleet”, which effectively uses a combination of logic and algebra to spit out an alert to contact the customer just prior to their timeframe for making a purchase. The problem is, it’s really hard to get accurate information to plug into the logic and algebra formulas! So, the first DIY vs. consultant question: Do we hire someone to make phone calls and download lists to get this information, or do we hire a consulting company in the industry that claims to already have this data? Do we try to build our own database of this information, or pay to upgrade an industry database that supposedly has all of this kept up-to-date?

In addition to the information problem, we’ve also got a resource problem. We simply don’t have enough programmers to support our open-source CRM. We’ve done a lot of customization already, but the CRM is still glitchy, which means that it’s difficult for us to run reports and update accounts. The consulting company at the Salesforce event says that since they’ve implemented hundreds of systems, they can streamline our implementation, and help us with the customization. Essentially, they can take a few months to make our system a well-oiled machine. So, the second DIY vs. consulting question: Do we block out time for our current IT resources to dedicate to the CRM? Hire someone to come in and support the CRM long-term? Or, do we hire a consulting company for an up-front investment in implementation? Do we put a consulting company on a yearly maintenance contract?

Finally, we’ve got a tech savvy problem! I was nerding out at the marketing implications of the latest product releases for Salesforce (that will probably turn into a topic for next week!), but at the end of the day, I’m not going to be the main user of the system. Our less-than-tech-savvy sales and management team will be the main users! And, the aviation industry is slow to come around to newer technology, particularly the social aspect of today’s platforms (remember those issues with a privacy threshold?). Thus, we can have a system with tons of bells and whistles, data overload, and tons of screens and fields. We’ve added fields to the current CRM system, which means you have to scroll for quite a while to get to the green “save” button at the bottom. You either have to go to a different screen, or scroll forever to add new engines and aircraft into the system, which makes it difficult for parse quickly. So, the last DIY vs. consulting question: Do we go back to the drawing board internally to figure out more specific requirements, or hire a consulting company that knows the aviation industry to tell us what our requirements should be? Do we fiddle with the system until we happen on a great UI, or bring in a professional that understands the human-computer interaction from a few decades back?

I thought the Clear Task article was very helpful, but it made me question our current course of action. What do you think? DIY or hire a consultant?