It’s good to be reminded every so often how poor twitter can be at conveying ideas. Yes it can be great conversation for conversation, well when you’re dealing with people you genuinely interact with rather than shouting into the ether! But it did remind me how much better blogs are for this. More blogs and less twitter, maybe that should be my resolution for the new year!
This was the post I put out here today.
Looking at a “platform” now that has another threaded chat “widget” embedded. £100 says it doesn’t play nicely and integrates in say Teams or any other platform!
— Jason Plant (@planty) January 14, 2019
I can’t say exactly who the product was, but that doesn’t really matter as the issue certainly isn’t just unique to them. The problem isn’t that the extra feature isn’t useful or that it won’t actually add something a fair few people will use. But the issue is the “feature” itself being something stock or boiler plate, something that is not specific to the actual problem this product is solving and easily used elsewhere.
This example today was ‘chat’ or threaded conversation around a topic, something that appears in so many platforms. Whether it’s the document management system (thanks to a good friend for reminding me of that one!), an intranet platform, a Microsoft product (you can substitute any other big IT vendor here) with Yammer/Teams etc they get everywhere. BUT and here is my issue, they’re all proprietary. So chat about the document in one system but don’t expect to see that in your topics in Teams for example.
From the vendors case I get it (new feature, extra sales etc). But I don’t know of any firm that decides to buy everything from one supplier, in fact we’re all in a brexit type compromise (sorry!). An unsatisfactory compromise between not wanting the best of breed in everything & the lack of interoperability on one hand and the compromise in some services & risk that everything from one supplier brings.
The answer? Maybe vendors could look at the building blocks out there and if someone has done it well already then look to add the feature through integration and cooperation? Want a chat facility? Maybe integrate with Teams? If you’re a legal specific vendor and want to store a document, integrate with iManage or netdocuments? It’s not much to ask for 2019 right?
It’s a really good point, and this feature is a particularly good example, as I don’t think any vendor wants to write their own chat application if that is not part of their core value proposition. The challenge for vendors is that there is not a clear winner in legal to integrate with. Skype For Business, Chatter (Salesforce), Yammer, Jabber & MS Teams are just a few options that come immediately to mind… I’m sure there are more… I’m no expert in that space.
Integrating with them all is a costly exercise initially, but don’t forget that it also puts a significant ongoing strain on your development and testing resource, as well as adding the risk that the release strategy of multiple other vendors can at any time eat into your own testing, development and release planning resource (where there is a need to test against each of their new releases, often at short notice, and sometimes hand-in-hand with pressure from a client who have already upgraded and found an issue that they deem a showstopper).
Because of this I think vendors currently choose to implement their own solution in order to limit these risks and retain control of their resources… even if the value of the feature to the client is as a result limited (we’re never going to write all the functionality of Skype or Teams into our own application).
I don’t know if there is an up to date resource detailing which firms use which application for chat, but that would be useful for vendors in deciding what, if anything, to integrate with rather than build themselves. If not, maybe a poll on your blog would be a good place to get a steer from the market on which applications are the front runners.