Posts

Siebel OpenUI has taken the Siebel world by storm. Arguably the single biggest announcement since Siebel 8.0 in Y2007 in this part of the world, the technology looks exciting and is a big boost to extend the aging product.

Imagine this - you have sat with the users for hours through the requirement gathering sessions. You got your technical team to design some magic to get those requirements in the application.

Often Siebel integration developers, Siebel developers themselves and other people who tend to show an interest in Siebel development from time to time, would want to know the source of all mysteries or rather, the source of a control displayed on the UI.

Usability requirements will be one in top 5 considerations for any new application deployment. However, they are seldom given the due respect in Siebel projects. IT functional and technical analysts assume that what Siebel provides out of the box (OOB) is holy and often push back on things that are not good from an application perspective (we don’t get into the merits of that argument here).

This happened to me recently. I was out of country for more than a month, and stopped using my phone number local to India. When I did get back to my life at Bangalore, Airtel customer service called me to inquire why my usage of their service has reduced and whether they can help with any issues with the service.

Siebel provides multiple options to integrate with external systems. Many a time the decision of the integration mechanism is just left to the the available talent, but not on how best a particular problem can be resolved.

Who does not love playing a game (and better yet, win it)? This element of human psychology can make the more mundane jobs like effective usage of CRM system interesting - at least, that’s what gamification proponents will want us to believe.

Is Siebel dead, or on the load road to nowhere? For some of the CRM enthusiasts this is a question long answered. If not already dead it is certainly on its way.

If you have been part of decision making process for CRM projects, you should have heard about RoI, or Return on Investment. All decision makers believe ROI for CRM is important, but do not get the teams to focus enough on that through the life cycle of projects.

Oracle Siebel CRM architecture is similar to the the standard 3-tier architecture employed for web applications and is straight-forward to understand. Though the concepts are well known, developers new to Siebel often do not articulate how the various pieces of puzzle come together.