Having a business application strategy has never been more important for organizations, and in 2021, every strategy should include solutions to enhance your customer experience. In fact, Gartner Group cites customer experience as a top strategic technology trend for 2021.
Reviewing what’s happening inside many organizations shows why business application strategy is key:
- The pandemic exposed gaps in mission-critical workflows.
- Applications don’t scale to a remote workforce and a virtual stakeholder.
- Critical back-office software is reaching end of life or end of support, including vintages of Act! and Microsoft Access.
Believe us when we say the time is right to conduct a comprehensive review with the goal of defining the business application strategy.
Why You Need a Business Application Strategy
Every technology, software, and platform have a defined lifespan. While Access and Act! were great tools in their time, they can start to break down. This is particularly true of solutions that required a lot of programming to enable organizations to do what they wanted.
Business application strategies map out the lifecycle of solutions so that companies can plan for upgrades, or migrate solutions as needed to take advantage of modern application benefits such as automation, analytics, or artificial intelligence. A defined strategy can also help ensure you aren’t chasing the next shiny solution that might be very cool but won’t help you achieve your goals.
We believe so strongly in the importance of tying measurable business goals and objectives to software development that we have built a proprietary methodology called eRADTM. It’s a detailed process that helps us work with our clients to produce detailed requirements which will help ensure custom software development projects meet corporate requirements today while ensuring future needs are considered and phased in.
Instant Gratification? New Solutions Need Time, Effort
It’s important to remember that, regardless of what solution you put into place, it will take time for your organization to start seeing deep benefits. For example, we wholeheartedly believe that all growing organizations need CRM solutions like Microsoft Dynamics to use a foundation for operations. An established, mature, modern platform that will help deliver the customer experience that’s expected in today’s marketplace.
But we need to be realistic when we discuss what CRM solutions will deliver and how quickly. For example, there’s an impression that once you implement a CRM solution, you’ll be able to start leveraging AI to gain deep and meaningful customer insights.
You won’t.
There’s no big red button that does it all.
Our expert developers can do a lot with logic and business process flow but ultimately someone in your organization must be there to fill in the data, and that’s what takes time and effort. Training algorithms and identifying patterns takes information, and volumes of it, but most organizations don’t generate the level of data needed.
Are we saying it’s not worth it? Absolutely not.
Top 2021 predictions agree that customer experience and data analytics should be a priority for every business. Solutions like Microsoft Dynamics will deliver a wide range of benefits that will help companies achieve those priority objectives including access to a consolidated dashboard of data which will give organizations access to valuable information at their fingertips, and from anywhere at any time. Since Dynamics uses the Common Data Model it enables consistency of data across applications and processes. It eliminates information silos which is the first step towards greater visibility and a 360 view of customer interactions.
To start seeing benefits like AI or machine learning, will take time, and the accumulation of much more data so it’s important to understand what a solution can do, can’t do, or will take time to accomplish before you get started. A business application strategy can help make sure expectations align with reality.
The Bottom Line: Every Organization Needs a Defined Business Application Strategy
To step up your game, you need a roadmap that tracks where you are today and where you want to go. Having a defined business application strategy will help plan out your journey so you can take advantage of the benefits that modern applications and platforms can offer while understanding the phases required to get to your end goal.
Do you have legacy databases reaching end of life and need help building a business application strategy to take your business to the next level? Is it time to step up your employee or customer experience? We’d love to help with that journey. Let’s chat.