For more than a year now, I, and our team at Chemical Business Media division of Access Intelligence have been working on making major transitions in how we create and present content online. We’ve been devising major changes in how we monetize that content, all the while revamping every process we use. Part of that transition was moving fulfillment vendors and re-tooling our entire back-end systems for customer information and order processing.

Why then did we simply move our databases from one fulfillment vendor to another instead of truly revamping how we think about maintaining customer information and how we interact with it?

We started with a very simple “brief”. Our new systems must be able to maintain traditional “BPA auditable subscriber files” while managing and gating our websites, expanding our overall marketing database functionality and helping us to consolidate customer information.

The key variable here being “maintain traditional BPA files”. Our thinking was, as is the thinking of most of my circulator colleagues, that outside fulfillment vendors and/or traditional “inhouse” software packages are required to manage and deploy our traditional print magazine subscriber files and audience metrics.

But, is this true anymore? Are we at the point now where we can manage all our traditional “circulation functions”, control our websites and expand our audiences armed only with a good database and a smart web development team?

For the past few years, when I work with our smart IT and web development people, they are very interested in building registration forms and databases. Simple forms and reg processes are relatively easy for them to create and deploy quickly. The downside, of course, is that each process and request on our site is managed and maintained separately and all the traditional check and balances for BPA audit are not present. Additionally, make this a paid order and issues around earning/deferring revenue, taxes, refunds, etc. become problematic.

More recently, even the above issues have become less problematic as we’ve been able to straightforwardly deploy these “in-house forms” and handle these traditional back-end functions. The one area we have not tasked them with is handling the processes and tracking necessary to manage a subscriber file to BPA’s rigid standard (rigid being a good thing in this context).

I think now that we could do this “in-house” with enough web developer time and some savvy on the part of our audience development team. In others words, eliminate the fulfillment vendor completely.

Now, before I get angry calls from my friends at the fulfillment vendors, the operative words above are “with enough web developer time”. Because the dynamics of building your own “bespoke” in-house system vs. working with an outside vendor are always tricky and often hard to quantify.

But, the economics of leveraging your web development team to create and maintain these systems are fast becoming much more compelling, as are the inherent benefits of working more closely with your in-house IT team.

The tighter integration that is inherent to having the entire registration, gating, and authentication process in-house means you should be able to test and deploy new offers, workflows and functionality quicker.

Plus, the “connective tissue” between your master marketing database and your website structure is much more robust, allowing you to personalize the user-experience and subsequently increase registrations and orders. And, most importantly, with one team handling the whole process, technical issues and workflows are better managed and maintained.

Additionally, the conventional wisdom of, “doing fulfillment in-house means you spend money to be always ahead of the curve technologically and hardware wise” no longer is problematic. Online media almost requires you to have extensive, ongoing systems development and enhancements. Now, more than ever, the requirements of websites, e-messaging and related technologies mean we can have continuously improved and re-developed database and registration/ordering systems.

In this vision of a fulfillment-less world, do our existing vendors and partners have a role. Of course, especially if they build on their traditional strengths of efficient, high-volume order processing and management of demographics in an audited environment. But, they only have thsi role if their solutions are easier to scope and deploy, more “turn-key” and much more “bleeding edge” than they are today.

I’m hoping our traditional partners can help us build everything from “one-click” ordering systems to elaborate, context sensitive e-commerce and customer data management solutions. But, if it’s getting easier for us at CBM (a relatively small content provider without a large IT infrastructure) to internally deploy forward-thinking site management, access control and user interface systems, it’s only a matter of time before we move all these functions in-house and leverage all the exciting development work we’re already doing.