Lack of CRM?... Even worse...

Some time ago, not so far to be honest, I was commenting the CRM consultancy scenario, underlying how poor this approach to services is among the stakeholders involved in a COTS application development and deployment.
Actually, too many times the implementation of a CRM platform is entrusted to people that, in the best cases, are technically skilled in the specific platform, but know not so much regarding the reason of CRM as a strategy that should involve all the organization levels. And, believe me, I am on the side of these technical experts (I am an IT engineer, in the end), because at least they know what they are talking about and they will surely explain you what is reasonable to be done with your brand new Package, or what is really absurd to implement. I would have much more to say regarding the so called "strategy experts", that often have never challenged themselves with concrete problems and the daily routine tasks that a lot of employees have to execute every working day.
But this consideration cannot bring me to accept what is happening in the IT scenario in relation to off-shore consultancy. Cheaper? ok; Practical? Perfect; efficient? Great... but if we arrive at the point that our European consultancy skills are evaluated by thousands of kilometers distant technical consultants.. well, no, now there's something that does not work properly.
Apart from the total lack of a European identity and, above all, the pride of belonging to the most ancient history and prestigious culture, what surprises me is some organizations' perspective.
Is it possible that a European client selects external consultancy entrusting off-shore companies that make selections evaluating European skilled consultants? Yes.. and it has already happened.
So what about quality? what about CRM? what about the ability to offer services that imply not only the specific platform knowledge, but also a good awareness of the market, of the culture, of the hidden needs that always an organization implicitly have?

At the beginning of this year I was already doing some considerations about Packaged Applications (PAs) - such as Siebel or SAP, and the relation to off-shore development. From my point of view, the raise of this kind of "development" witnesses the defeat of the PAs concept: a ready-to-be-used application that can be easily customized and that enables the internally retention of the business processes knowledge. This is the concept that have made Siebel's fortune at the end of the 90's, for example.
Then everybody has understood that all those gold promises, apart from being good marketing, had not so solid basis... Ok, it's straightforward that every organization wants to implement its own strategy, its own processes, and cannot accept to rely on the 80% of the off-the-shelf functionalities; otherwise how one company could be better than another??
But the answer cannot be now applying the old pattern of the custom development! We are returning to the old, pure, development model!
The fact that PAs have disappointed its customers, does not mean that the original idea was bad or wrong! It simply demonstrates that customization, even if not development (as Siebel initially stated), cannot abstract from a good Business Analysis, a Design Methodology or IT Engineering, otherwise who customizes the application cannot be totally aware of the original requirements!
So what has happened? That we are returning to the origins, and now a PA is treated just like a custom Java application! And that's even worse..

Personally I will continue investing in applied research, in an approach to modeling, designing and customizing, that enables my clients to walk by their own in their CRM journey, with the certainty that they base their application management on a solid methodology and that, when change happens, they can always refer to me or my methodology aware colleagues.
This has been the aim of my Ph.D. thesis and this will be my effort in the consultancy offer, together with the new approach and possibilites offered by tools like TIBCO Business Studio or the Oracle BPA suite.
Our aim must be correcting the errors and lacks of the first and second PAs generation, not overstaying on a wrong but trendy and third-parties remunerative model.