Are there times your technology suite should look like a salad bowl? Absolutely yes.
First of all, depending on your particular sourcing strategy, you might actually want your suite to be made from disparate technology vendors. If you choose a best of breed approach, in many areas you’ll be forced away from the ERP’s and into point solutions. While this is going to give you better functionality in many cases, it will also be much harder for you to make the “melting pot” user experience I talked about in part one of this series.
Another time you’ll want salad bowls is when you have different branding needs, and different engagement problems. This does not mean that your technology suite looks like a salad bowl, but that your deployment strategy of those technologies is a salad bowl. If you have multiple business units that operate with distinctly different business rules or with distinct branding requirements, approaching these as distinct UI set-ups will be critical. While keeping things simple within the organization is quite important, it’s not nearly as important as the display of brand – which will impact employee engagement (lightly or not). Similarly, different organization might have different business needs. A business unit that has severe engagement problems may want to highlight different functionality than a BU with retention problems.
Regardless of the “salad bowl” at the organizational level, the point is still true that your employee at the end of the process should have a melting pot to deal with – a single experience that melds all functionality into a seamless platform.
One response to “Melting pot or Salad bowl part 2”
[…] I started to reply to DoubleDubs’ post: Melting Pot or Salad Bowl part 2 but I got so verbose I figured I better put it down here. Go read his originals, then come back. […]