Take the “C” out of “CRM” and you‘re left with Relationship Management – and that’s the right way to think about your CRM solution.

An effective CRM shouldn’t be just about sales and marketing. It’s a platform for developing line of business applications – applications that manage and track information and processes around real-world objects.

The object could be a customer, but it could also be a grant, building, or a potential candidate for hire. The key question is: “Do I need to track the information and activities related to this entity?” If the answer is “yes,” then you should be thinking xRM, where the ‘x’ might represent ‘supplier,” ‘channel,’ ‘partner,” or some other term. Interactive marketing and technology consultancy Ascentium Corporation recently published a white paper which examined the example of one widely-used CRM solution, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, as an xRM platform.

The power of the platform
Imagine that Microsoft Dynamics CRM is an iceberg. The part you see, the CRM application itself, sits above the water and represents only about a fifth of the total size of the iceberg. But 80 percent of the power and potential of Microsoft Dynamics CRM lies beneath the surface – in the platform layer and the application framework.

Because it was built as a platform, Microsoft Dynamics CRM had to be metadata-driven. While the application portion of the system includes a Sales module, a Marketing module, and a Service module, the underlying database simply contains a set of entities, each with certain characteristics and relationships.

What is called an “opportunity” in the application and is used to track potential sales opportunities could just as easily be called a “proposal” and be used to track proposals and manage grant applications. What is called a “contact” could be a patient in a health and human services system.

In fact, the platform allows you to change the names of these core entities to accommodate the function they will perform in your business.

Business applications typically track information about people, money, products, or services; the activities and communications done around them; and the relationships between them. Microsoft Dynamics CRM was designed to capture exactly that kind of information.

The people Microsoft Dynamics CRM tracks may all be internal to your organization, rather than customers. Or they might be citizens coming to your public sector agency. Or a combination of patients, doctors, and staff. It doesn’t matter. They are people with relationships and around whom actions are being performed and tracked.

The Agile organisation
Choosing a platform isn’t just about solving today’s problems. It’s about building for the future. The platform you choose will be with you for some time to come, so you need to make sure you have a solid foundation on which to build your business – one that is able to respond as the business changes. It’s critical these days that businesses respond quickly to change. Therefore, organisations prefer not to spend years developing a line of business (LOB) application.

Solutions need to be implemented in months, not years. You can’t spend a year to roll out a CRM system. You can’t spend a year to roll out an asset management system.

Selecting a platform that allows for rapid development and an iterative process is one of the keys to building a successful long-term LOB strategy. The right platform helps ensure business agility.

One of the unanticipated benefits of having Microsoft CRM as your platform is that it facilitates reuse. Code you used in one application can be reused or repurposed to serve the needs of your latest application. You‘ll soon have a collection of code and tools that you can leverage for new LOB applications. Not to mention the fact that your business applications all reuse the same data.

* Ascentium Corporation’s white paper, Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a Business Application Platform, can be downloaded from: www.ascentium.com/capabilities/crm.aspx

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