Loosely coupled systems across customer engagement

Lightning Talk
Michael Parry, Museum of Applied Art & Sciences (Powerhouse Museum), Australia, Dan Collins, Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences, Australia

A familiar tale for many museums is the challenge of managing the myriad of ticketing, membership, donor, eMarketing, VIP, invitation and education customer databases to name just a few. Combine this with rapidly changing business requirements, a highly distributed workforce and you have a messy set of business problems to solve.
While a monolithic CRM to rule them all is appealing, a range of compromises across platforms and products that major on some aspect of ticketing, or donor management or eMarketing mean that inevitably some function within the organisation suffers from a less than ideal solution. At MAAS we have embarked on a multi-year project of selecting best of breed systems for each function and coupling them loosely – all in the cloud. We’ll present what we have learnt to date, what parts of this ecosystem are mature – and which walls we’ve been bashing our heads against.