What does WORM mean when it’s related to data (as opposed to it’s old use relating to drives). Well it means the same thing, Write Once Read Many, but now the applicability relates to centralised and shared organisational data.
How many customer lists do you have? Typically, we see them contained in your CRM system, your accounting system, your service desk system, your timesheet system and the list can go on...
Now, keeping this data in sync is a task no one wants but someone has to do or your business will quickly loose opportunities, money and the plot generally. You may have combined service desk and timesheets, well done, that’s one less update to manage, but how are you getting on aligning prospect accounts in CRM with actual accounts in your ledger? Whether you’ve built interfaces (easy to discuss, intriguingly hard to manage) or you simply download/edit/upload spreadsheets every now and again, you are writing many times, not once.
WORM means having one customer list (including prospects, old customers, resellers etc) that every system in the organisation shares. Sounds easy, but it’s not. Most system are quite protective about control of counterparty records making abstraction very difficult. Your remote update methods need to be able to deal with every use-case each subscribing system needs. That’s tough.
Now let’s consider contacts. Not only will you have a subset of contacts in every system that has counterparties (so now add your Purchase Order system to the list), every one of your employees will have contacts stored in their email service, only some of which will find their way into shared systems and probably none of which will be linked across your silo-ed infrastructure. Again, if you write it once and then let everyone use it, imagine how much easier contact history threading is to achieve (well actually it will just become possible for the first time ever).
If you are now sold on the benefits of WORM organisational data, what’s the next step? Well the easiest way to achieve these efficiencies is to have an end-to-end PSA solution that is also the master data record for everything. This means it must have a footprint that encompasses CRM, delivery AND accounting.
Harmony is the only PSA solution on the market that delivers the ability to model all your master data on a single non-modular system. With Harmony you will never have to synchronise data ever again, imagine how great that would be…
