Why your business isn’t unlocking all ROI in IT – and should be!

Technology platform

Companies should ideally be using 100 percent of the functionality of their IT solutions. But in the real world, this simply doesn’t happen. There will always be neglected potential in IT. But what if, instead of 25-50% functionality, use you could reach 60-80%?

How many more meetings could a salesperson book per month? How much time could mobile employees save with more effective communication tools? How many more inquiries could customer service agents handle? How could the volume and quality of reports to manage increase? The possibilities seem almost limitless.

Today, huge untapped business potential is overlooked because companies don’t have the time and insight into how they can optimize the use of the business solutions they’ve already purchased.

There is a pattern to this behavior. It usually begins with a request from a device in-store, and may include sales, marketing or customer service. Here, you identify a challenge and then you zoom in on the technology that can solve it. If the project receive investment, the solution is then implemented, contributes to the company’s existing system landscape, and finally operational end-users try their best to draw value from the new tool.

You might be thinking, what’s wrong with that?

Firstly, it’s wrong that IT support for a specific issue is not a part of an overall IT strategy. The individual IT solution becomes just another needle stuck into a problem area with the hope that it will have the desired effect on the rest of the body. Sometimes it succeeds and sometimes it doesn’t, and its success often depends on coincidences.

The alternative to this approach is to tie in an overall enterprise and governance structure within the company’s IT investments. It means that when a business unit is complaining about lack of functionality, central IT resources have a full view of the overall system landscape and can, for example, discover that the requested functionality already exists on the platform, but is just not being used. With an overview of the entire IT architecture, you can also ensure that new business applications easily integrate with the default platform, and so you don’t need to build and maintain new code yourself.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is not just a standard technology platform in the cloud – it is also a gateway to a wide range of business applications supported by the Dynamics 365 platform, so all the functionality automatically slots together. For example, ClickDimensions Document Corepack from MSCRMAddOns for Document Management, or Modern Service Management within IT Service Management.

At AlfaPeople, our experts spend a lot of time optimizing enterprise system landscapes so that all users get exactly the support they need. This could be in terms of better utilization of existing functionality, but it may also be the form of insights into Microsoft’s product roadmap, so the company will know from its adviser where to aim, and so that investment can be targeted at future solutions.

Technology is not just technology, and functionality is not just functionality. Technology use must align precisely with your business strategy, industry requirements, employee composition, and functionality needs. And if it’s already on the platform you’re using, why buy something else?

Download the whitepaper

You can read more about how to ensure continuous support, maintenance and upgrading of your Microsoft Dynamics platform in our whitepaper Why Invest In Support and Maintenance?.

Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 here.