Some Explanations At Last

Well, today we at last have an admission from Business Catalyst that progress has been slow, together with an explanation of why. To quote the BC blog post:

1. We’ve had to invest a large amount of effort into system stability and reliability, e.g. we’ve already launched new data centers in New Jersey, USA and Dublin, Ireland, which of course were prioritized over wishlist requests.
2. We acquired a new engineering team to work on the platform shortly after the acquisition. While we had high hopes in the beginning that we could be releasing new features immediately, the reality is that it’s taken the team a significant amount of time to familiarize themselves with BC’s codebase and architecture. It’s only now and moving forward into the future that we’ll start reaping the benefits of this investment the engineers have made in understanding BC.
3. As a consequence of switching engineering teams, we underestimated how difficult it was to implement some of your customer requests and so we over-promised in the beginning.
4. Moving forward we need to put a greater emphasis on quality and testing to make sure that new features and bugfixes are stable which means we will be sacrificing some speed in delivering features

Of course it is not surprising that a new engineering team will take time to get up to speed with an existing system. In fact it is inevitable. And that’s what’s surprising — that BC management (and especially Adobe management) didn’t see this coming. It suggests a lack of experience and wisdom in the organisation.

This admission is not encouraging, because as is explained further down in the BC blog post, very little progress has been made with the wishlist. Goodness knows how long the wishlist must be by now! The design limitations of BC are disappointing to say the least and BC users, many of whom are smart, clever people, have discovered the myriad problems with the system and documented these in the wishlist. I’ve added some myself, and they’re not just cosmetic issues, but significant deficiencies in design and function. Looks like we will be waiting some time yet to see our wishes granted.