Saturday, August 14, 2010

Why the pigeon holes?

I was in a meeting with some IT folks the other day talking about some customizations I had done for a company and their reaction to what we had done struck me as a bit odd.  We had created a module to help gather design, support and business requirements from a potential customer along with the response from engineering, manufacturing, materials and finance for the purpose of generating better quotes easier. It was all inside the PLM tool and as we explained it the IT folks dismissed it with a "that'll go into a CRM". We proceeded to go over a few other modules we had put into the PLM and with every module their response was "that'll go into a xxx".  Now keep in mind that the company didn't own any of these stand alone tools so would need to purchase, deploy, possibly integrate and support them all before they would be able to use them in a similar fashion. 

My question is --
How is this pigeon holing of functionality a good thing for the company?