To achieve strategic advantage, companies often look to their information technology (IT) departments for line-of business (LOB) applications that help them outperform their competitors. Whether it is a business intelligence application that provides managers with unique insights into market opportunities, a business process application that enables rapid delivery of products and services to market, or a customer relationship application that helps the company differentiate with superior customer service, business applications are often critical to creating competitive advantage. However, IT faces a number of challenges when providing these applications. Constraints in skills, budgets, and time can significantly limit successful delivery of these applications. Addressing these challenges with the proper application frameworks, tools, and infrastructure is a strategic, business-critical decision.
Historically, developing LOB applications has entailed a mix of custom-developed solutions and packaged software with additional integrations and customizations. However, it is not uncommon for this approach to result in difficult compromises in terms of project scope, cost, time, functionality, and complexity. Over time, many organizations began to suffer under the administrative burden of these disparate solutions—often each with its own management requirements, development technologies, and infrastructure. In order to address these challenges in a consistent and cost-effective way, organizations are turning to business application frameworks designed to provide rapid development and deployment of a wide range of custom applications.
The xRM business application framework of the Microsoft Dynamics® CRM offering is designed to help organizations meet their LOB application requirements more economically than traditional approaches by providing rapid application development, a high degree of flexibility, and consolidated systems management.
