The Design Language of Your CRM Solution, Part 3 - Giving CRM Users What They Want

In the previous two parts of this series I wrote about the changing direction of how CRM solution vendors are increasingly targeting the end user with the functionality they are developing, rather than the top level managers who consume the metrics produced from CRM data. Now it's time to look at what functionality in Microsoft Dynamics CRM can make it more "viral friendly".

Today we already have the tools to build quite comprehensive applications for managing various business processes through the declarative programming model of Dynamics CRM and the ever growing portfolio of ISV add-ons and ready-made integrations to popular third party applications & services. These pieces can be combined in so many different ways that the amount of custom code needed for meeting the business requirements of CRM customers is continuously shrinking, which I consider a highly positive development.

With this ever expanding toolkit in our hands, we still need to keep in mind that building the business logic into the system gets us only half way. The ultimate goal of a CRM system implementation is to drive business process changes and realize the resulting performance improvements - not just to offer data processing functionality. In order to achieve such results it is not enough for the technology to just support the processes, it must also take part in communicating them to the users. Yes, the machine should preferably tell the man what is expected of him to get the job done.

"If only everybody worked the way we planned"

In a CRM system implementation project, after the ideal usage patterns of the new application have been mapped out in ...