When it comes to your client’s enterprise software, IT and CIO bosses still control the purchasing agenda. And they gravitate towards legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs) and Customer Relationship Management (CRMs) platforms, even for crisis and critical event management. Why are these purchases inhibiting to resilience?
IT still controlling client software purchasing for the worse
Although useful for IT service management, these platforms often see their applicability stretched far beyond recognition to the crisis and critical event management use case, where they’re a particularly poor fit.
Why?
For one, ERP and CRM users often complain that those platforms lack basic usability. They feel stiff, even painful.
That matters because research suggests that it’s not a specific feature set but great user experience that drives software adoption. Conversely, poor user experience lowers adoption.
When there is adoption, it’s unwilling – use is grudging, users less willing to engage.
As a result, users come up with effortful workarounds (enter Shadow IT, Excel, Word, and emails), meaning work is duplicated, security is compromised, and investments are sunk further.
There’s also a steeper learning curve for new users – another hidden cost.
New users have to get up to speed on your client’s legacy ERP or CRM. And here, poor user experience only makes the training lift that much harder, even if the staggering increase in critical events means new users need to be getting up to speed faster than ever.
ERPs and CRMs also relegate clients to yesterday’s best practices.
Not like things improve once client users are up to speed.
That’s because these platforms don’t provide access to the latest best practices, devised by communities of experts who’ve learned from the COVID experience and the generalized rise in other critical events.
Without access to such a comprehensive library of solutions, templates, and well-considered modules, clients who’ve purchased ERP and CRM solutions only limit their organization’s base of knowledge. They also stymie their own resilience goals and increase the time needed to get up and running with the latest best practices.
What’s worse, these legacy solutions have little to say about the management of critical events that emerge outside of IT, e.g., workplace accidents, natural hazards, as well as reputational and physical security threats. And it’s these non-IT incidents that eventually impinge on IT services.
Instead, it’s within the limited confines of IT-centric incidents and disruptions, such as helpdesk support and troubleshooting procedures, that these (often ITSM-based) solutions excel. There, the lay out clear processes and actions, through well-articulated workflows.
Otherwise, client crisis leaders and their teams will struggle to get the requisite coordination, visibility, and situational-awareness-enhancing capabilities from ERPs and CRMs for crisis and critical event management.
The inevitable question then is, towards which solutions should stakeholders turn, instead? That’s where innovative SaaS products come in, such as those to which you get access by
becoming a Noggin Partner.
Indeed, becoming a Noggin Partner gives you the power to add our integrated critical event management software platform to your software toolbelt. Keen to learn more? Check out the Noggin Partnership Program.
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