The problems with xRM

For the past year or so, I've been hearing the Microsoft Dynamics CRM community talking about the concept of xRM. Supposedly xRM is the idea that you can do all sorts of custom development on top of the MS CRM platform instead of using it just for traditional CRM kinds of tasks.

To that I say, "big deal."

To clarify, I think that using MS CRM as a platform for custom development is generally a good thing. I started doing it with CRM 3.0 back in 2006, and today my company runs almost entirely on top of a heavily customized MS CRM 4.0 installation - sales/customer service/commissions receipts/contract management/etc., but I still hate the idea of xRM for four reasons.

1. It's all about the customer, stupid.
Replacing the big "C" in CRM with a little "x" implies that something other than the customer is what's most important. Sure I went into technology so I wouldn't have to sell things to people, but at the end of the day, serving a customer is what pays my mortgage. In any organization that's going to last, it needs to be understood that everybody either serves the customer or serves somebody who serves the customer.

2. There's nothing new about xRM.
My company started building our entire business technology stack on top of MS CRM back in 2006. We started seriously investigating it back in 2005. Back then nobody talked about xRM as a separate aspect of CRM; it was just made clear to us that we could customize MS CRM to meet our specific needs. The push to label everything involving customizations xRM (including the new SDK namespaces - give me a break) reeks of marketing buzzword-speak. If you, as Microsoft or a partner, can't explain the capabilities of MS CRM without needing to invent a new nonsense phrase, you should reassess your communication strategy.

3. More alphabet soup, please.
XRM is another term that meant something to somebody at some point, but is destined to become misused, misunderstood and generally bastardized. Anybody sick of hearing about "the cloud" yet? You'll feel that way about xRM soon enough.

4. Everything is not a nail.
When I started with MS CRM, I was amazed by both the ease with which customizations could be developed and the speed with which new code could be rolled out to meet our needs. It's nice when a developer doesn't have to worry about pesky things like security, data storage or integrating a separate application with the company's CRM system. It was so nice that I felt like I had a shiny new hammer, and every business problem looked like a big nail.

Unfortunately the ease with which I was able to develop new mini-applications inside the CRM sandbox made it easy to overlook certain limitations of CRM as a development platform. The way MS CRM stores certain kinds of data has also been less than ideal for my needs.

Reflecting on past experiences, probably half of what we built on top of CRM could have been built without too much trouble in something like ASP.Net MVC. Of course you don't need developers to create new forms or workflows in CRM, so this sword cuts both ways. I'm not criticizing MS CRM for its pros and cons as a platform, but I am suggesting that if somebody tells you  xRM means that you can and should build anything you want on top of MS CRM, you want to take that claim with a grain of salt.