THE END OF IT-DEPENDENT CCM UNTIL THAT BURDEN IS LIFTED, BUSINESS TEAMS WILL CONTINUE TO SEE THEIR TIME AND BUDGETS STRETCHED THIN
BY PATRICK KEHOE
E
nterprise software has aimed to remove friction, reduce reliance on technical resources and put more control in the hands of the teams who understand the task at hand. In the 1980s and 1990s, command-line applications gave way to point-and-click graphical interfaces. The 2000s ushered in web-based systems that connected teams across locations, enabling broader access to tools once limited to IT. More recently, SaaS, cloud platforms and low-/no-code tools have expanded that access even further, giving non-technical teams the ability to configure and adapt enterprise systems to their specific needs. Customer communications management (CCM) has followed this same evolutionary arc, albeit more slowly. Well into the 2010s, and still today in many organizations, CCM remained a highly technical, back-office function dependent on code-heavy legacy
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systems. Each change, no matter how small, required logging a ticket and waiting for IT to code, test and deploy the update. For enterprises managing thousands of regulated communications, those cycles consumed staggering amounts of time, money and resources. The Current State of Business User Control in CCM Today, nearly every CCM vendor promises some level of “business user control.” While most represent improvements over their legacy predecessors, many only provide limited controls and require IT intervention. Business users may be able to edit text or swap images, but more complex tasks — data mapping, business rule configuration, sophisticated personalization, managing layouts testing — still require script or code. At the same time, many vendors have struggled to adapt their solutions
to the cloud and, in some cases, the SaaS version offers a limited, partial set of capabilities compared to their on-premise solution. Much of the process still happens behind firewalls, hidden within thick-client systems only technical teams can configure. Many CCM systems also fail to provide a scalable solution to the fragmentation of content across channels. Separate tools for print, email SMS and web delivery perpetuate silos of templates, rules and data connections. The result is a patchwork of disconnected environments that remain difficult to govern and slow to change — and which IT teams still bear the brunt of maintaining. Some enterprises have outsourced the entire function to third-party service providers. For smaller organizations with limited technical resources, this approach can make sense. But outsourcing doesn’t restore control, it simply moves the queue outside the