As part of our work to bring you the latest and most insightful updates into the world of Microsoft technology through our annual Careers and Hiring Guide, we sat down with some of the most successful and innovative thought-leaders in our industry to find out where they think the space is headed, and how Microsoft professionals, partners, and customers alike can prepare for the future.
As a Microsoft Partner with over 35 years of experience in the field (and more than 26 Partner of the Year Awards to their name), HSO is certainly well-positioned to offer tips about achieving implementation success and the skills you need to get there.
In this edition, Director at Nigel Frank Craig Allen sits down with David Johnson, Operations Director at HSO to talk about implementing Dynamics 365, and where the product could be headed in the near future.
So firstly David, what do you think organizations should be looking for in a Microsoft implementation or migration partner at the minute?
This could be boiled down into two or three different areas.
You’re obviously looking for someone who will provide your business with leadership and aligns well with your industry expertise and experience, and someone who has a track record of both digital transformational change, and having the functional and technical knowledge of how the Microsoft solution hangs together.
I think some organizations will focus on purely the change side of the journey without being able to handle the functional implementation and technical aspects.
Some partners will very much be coming from a technical background but won’t necessarily understand the business, and some will have relevant change and implementation experience, but probably not the sector expertise that the customer will have specific requirements around.
So if you can find a partner who can provide all of those—the functional and technical expertise, plus the track record within that industry—I think you’re onto a winner.
What are the most important skills and expertise needed to execute a full Dynamics 365 implementation?
Clearly, you need to understand the product set as Microsoft Dynamics has moved from an on-premise solution to the cloud. You want to stay as close to vanilla as possible and ensure that you’re configuring a solution rather than trying to change it.
But there are then different aspects technically within the Azure platform that will enable you to build ‘add-on’ applications and help you to make the best use of analytics and security.
So you’ve got the technical side, but at heart you’re changing business and trying to make it more efficient. And therefore, you do need to understand the people aspect of the journey that you’re going on, as well as the business change that’s driving the digital transformation journey for that customer.
I do think you need all of those elements to be truly successful. Some organizations will deal with the business side and the change side, and partner with someone who’s got the detailed functional and technical knowledge to provide the understanding of the product set.
What would you say are the most common challenges with a Dynamics 365 implementation, and how can organizations prepare to avoid them?
The biggest one is always around data. Data has become more and more valuable to businesses. Features and functions in product sets are a differentiator, but the value comes now with the ability to mine data and understand the insights that arise out of that data.
Many businesses, as they move from legacy solutions to newer cloud applications, will find that their data is in a mess requiring an awful lot of rework and cleanse of that data to make it valuable to them for insights and movements forward.
The features and functions in a product set is now less important than the overall business process, and how that data will be interacted with throughout.
How do you see Dynamics 365 evolving in the next few years?
Microsoft is putting a lot of stock into artificial intelligence. They’re also talking about bringing their platform closer together. So they’re talking about one Dynamics product, or an evolution to a single platform driven by the need to be able to benefit from data interaction, which is at the heart of the artificial intelligence journey.
I think that idea of convergence of products will continue, though it might take a little bit longer. It seems to have fallen down the priority list compared to AI, but AI does need a unified data set in order to work effectively.
How will the increased presence of AI impact Dynamics?
You’re already seeing products like Copilot that are working across different Microsoft applications being brought into the ERP and CE landscape. That will only increase as people want to get insights into the data that they have, but also find out how they can manipulate and use that data to drive process efficiency.
Are you seeing a rise in demand for AI-powered products and features?
We are, albeit many customers are probably still trying to understand how to use what they have in order to get the best insights available on the analytics side. And also on the generative AI side to create data sets, or ensure that they can engage with external data sets to bring some of the challenges to life.
I think people are wrapped up with the tech, and need to try and identify how it brings value to them from a business perspective.
What kind of skills do you think partners in particular need to be looking for in candidates to future-proof their bench moving forward?
Cloud technology: analytics, the wider Azure platform and security and cloud application development are big-growth areas. And all of those are wrapped around master data management and interaction with data.
We’re seeing less demand for your historic features and functions, and for consultants around ERP and CE, and more around data scientists, analytics, and security to work out how businesses can best take advantage of things like AI.
However, that doesn’t mean that you don’t need that overall digital transformation that is driven by your big business applications—you’re still going to need those historic skills. What I think will happen is the architect skills and the defining of the journey will become more valuable than the details around how to implement Dynamics 365 Finance within a generic set of process areas.
What do you feel is going to be the biggest challenge for the Microsoft partner community in the next twelve months?
The movement towards enterprise-level customers will be a huge shift. Some of us have been doing it for a while, but others are now coming into the field of play and they need to deliver on bigger expectations from the customer side, to not only support the transformation journey, but also to see it as a long-term relationship.
There may be also an element similar to ‘historic outsourcing’ to a partner in the cloud rather than a customer wanting to retain responsibility for their IT infrastructure and landscape.
For me, it’s about underpinning and adding value further down the road, rather than just thinking about a short-term engagement that changes the application and then undertaking an ongoing support contract, which would have been the model that, five to ten years ago, most people would have been working with, providing both a technical and industry focus.
It’s now an online, real-time, always-evolving solution set, and a partner needs to be ahead of the game to be able to add value for the customer that they’re working with.
