Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event is now 10 years old, and it’s reached the stage where it draws a true sample of the Salesforce ecosystem. Of course, there are plenty of Salesforce personnel and vendors whose products work with Salesforce, but there is an increasing number of real customers. For me, one of the really exciting things is how many of these customers come from segments other than technology. Very naturally, the people in high-tech know where to look for technology solutions to their problems — so of course, they understand the acronyms and are familiar with the culture of technology.
I don't think that it helps anyone's cause when certain buzzwords, such as sCRM, are hijacked by businesses offering other products or and co-opted to boost their sales. That's the cynical view, but then there's also the genuine muddying of the definition brought on naturally by technological convergence.
When sCRM was first coined there wasn't a product currently performing the function, but there was a fair idea of how one might develop. Now, sCRM has expanded and enveloped every business 2.0 technology and/or concept (and a few more) to become something so vast, that it's very difficult to explain it in boilerplate language to a 'layman'. The danger here is that, in a bid to mention all, people become too macro in their explanation of it, to the detriment of the concise, practical uses.
The tragedy being, that this would lead to customers with a real need for the product, being turned off by the vast paradigm-shifting (see: expensive integration project garnering) it's perceived to represent. The article correctly points out that it's the duty of vendors to better define these concepts and products to their customers, for the sake of everyone involved.
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Breaking the Tech Terminology Barrier
Posted by: Christopher J. Bucholtz December 9, 2010 05:00 AMSalesforce.com’s Dreamforce event is now 10 years old, and it’s reached the stage where it draws a true sample of the Salesforce ecosystem. Of course, there are plenty of Salesforce personnel and vendors whose products work with Salesforce, but there is an increasing number of real customers. For me, one of the really exciting things is how many of these customers come from segments other than technology. Very naturally, the people in high-tech know where to look for technology solutions to their problems — so of course, they understand the acronyms and are familiar with the culture of technology.
When sCRM was first coined there wasn't a product currently performing the function, but there was a fair idea of how one might develop. Now, sCRM has expanded and enveloped every business 2.0 technology and/or concept (and a few more) to become something so vast, that it's very difficult to explain it in boilerplate language to a 'layman'. The danger here is that, in a bid to mention all, people become too macro in their explanation of it, to the detriment of the concise, practical uses.
The tragedy being, that this would lead to customers with a real need for the product, being turned off by the vast paradigm-shifting (see: expensive integration project garnering) it's perceived to represent. The article correctly points out that it's the duty of vendors to better define these concepts and products to their customers, for the sake of everyone involved.