Executive Summary
Different Strategies for Moving Ahead with Siebel Implementations and Methods to Assess Your Career
At a philosophical level, all software is an attempt to capture the real world. This is especially true of enterprise software, which models the transactions and interactions of corporations and other large organizations.
Development on Siebel software first began 20 years ago. Since that time, the world changed in ways the original developers could never have envisioned. In 1993, there were only 500 Web pages and no smartphones. In 2013, there are 4.09 billion pages and 1.4 billion smartphones. Although Siebel technology shows many signs of robustness, it is also showing some signs of age. Does that mean organizations will be forced to abandon the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars they have invested in Siebel over the years? Many people in the market would have you believe that, yes, this investment must be abandoned, but the honest answer is it depends.
It depends on the success of the application. It depends on how quickly the supported business is changing. And it depends on other factors outlined in this report. Once you determine where your implementation stands, the best strategy to follow going forward naturally emerges. At a high level, these strategies can be described as:
- Move Forward
- Move Away
- Restart
- Innovate Around the Edges
- Stand Pat
- Abandon
Since enterprise software is an attempt to model the real world and the world is always changing, adapting software to reflect it is a never-ending task. Therefore, your strategy must be reviewed periodically to ensure it is still valid.