Empowered BI: The Evolving Technology Boosting Data Insight in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The saying "data is the new oil" was coined in 2006 by Clive Humby, a British data commercialization entrepreneur. This now famous phrase was embraced by the World Economic Forum in 2011 report, which considered data to be another vital economic asset, like oil.

Considering the macro trends that are emerging and expected to impact Technology, Media and Service providers in the next ten years, we recognize the growing importance of data-driven insights (strategic big data, actionable analytics), and that those insights may not always come from the usual suspects like full time analysts or the centers of excellence.  For businesses that have already invested wisely in data platforms, the powerful analysis tools and huge data sources now at the fingertips of the average information worker are already showing promising and profitable results.  Within the field of marketing (the marketing guru Michael Palmer picked up the "new oil" phrase in his blog in 2006), thought leaders recognized the transformation years ago and there is plenty of evidence to support the continuing shift of vision toward a digital world of multi-channel experiences and technology enablers like new devices and application platforms.

These transformations in the marketplace have already begun changing the consumer's experience and expectations, influencing not only marketing processes but also sales and certainly customer service processes. These trends will be relevant for the coming years so let us take a peek into what the data journey will bring to our world of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Shifts in the marketplace

With the current state of technology and shifts like Consumerization of IT, the scenarios that were dreamt of years ago are now actually happening all around us. This means we are now ready to actually drill for the oil and to start refining the crude resource into profitable products. For CRM, these refined products are extensive, but producing them means achieving new maturity levels around marketing, sales, and service process management. Recent updates to the Dynamics CRM product roadmap, including acquisitions (MarketingPilot, Yammer) and partnerships (Moxie Software), confirm that the best relationship management platform available is heading in the right strategic direction.

Microsoft provides users (and system integrators) with more than just Dynamics CRM as part of the relationship management platform. Within this series of articles I would like to show the power of the combined platform of Dynamics CRM and BI for optimized customer engagement. To put it even more boldly: without the combination of Microsoft BI and Dynamics CRM, actionable insights on the Microsoft platform don't exist.

As for empowerment of employees, the quote from Pablo Picasso: "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers," is interesting in this context as the smart empowered people in your organization can come up with the right questions and use the newest tools to derive answers from their useless computers.

The yin-yang of Actionable Insights

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides the action (engagement) side of the Actionable Insights platform while the Microsoft BI stack provides the insight side of this yin-yang that is needed to stay relevant in the marketplace. Within the field of IT architecture, only an adaptive platform will help an organization to reach the level of agility needed to gain a competitive advantage. In the field of acting on insights from all the discoverable (internal, external, free, proprietary, structured, unstructured) data sets, everyone can see the need for agility and speed by examining the dynamic world of social media and mobility. Market leaders get replaced by newcomers in the market with ever more increasing speeds, and discovery of new intelligence ahead of the competition is key - when data insights become a commodity it's already too late to steer the oil tanker away from rocks.

Microsoft is known for its low total cost of ownership (TCO) and proves this on both the Dynamics CRM and BI platforms, but it is usually not the best-of-breed choice in the field of niche analytics - or what used to be niche analytics. As the amount of accessible and actionable insight grows, both consumers and knowledge workers become poised to turn that knowledge into value.

The current analytics market is still dominated by the domain of Centers of Excellence, but leaders in IT management have already started managing the shift to self-service BI. Think of Microsoft Excel as your gateway to data insights and you'll understand the empowerment perspective from the Microsoft platform.

As for data-driven decision-making, companies that are in the top third of their industry and use data-driven decision making are more productive and profitable than their non-data-driven decision-making competitors. So we know it can work for organizations; but how are we going to get there with the current tools, technology, and state of mind?

To show what is needed and available, this series of articles will cover the different aspects of self service BI: master data management, (big data) analytics, and data insights as a service. And it will cover Dynamics CRM as an engagement platform using the insights provided to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time and place.

Stay tuned for the upcoming articles in this series that will provide details on the topics that we touched upon at a high-level in this introduction.