As another year comes and goes, we face a whole host of New Year’s resolutions and promises to ourselves that “this will be the year” we achieve whatever our heart desires.

But I can honestly say that I have seen more action than words in these first few weeks of 2017 and I do believe this is partly down to the way in which some companies have deployed technology to appeal to our human nature! Let me explain…

ADDING A COMPETITIVE EDGE

I don’t know about you, but I find that even the most boring of tasks can be made more interesting when you introduce an element of competition.

Now this may be because I am a naturally competitive person. But never has that competitive edge been more obvious than with the reasonably priced fitness band “Fitbit”, which seemed to emerge as one of the gifts of choice this Christmas, offering a variety of ways to monitor and track your fitness.

Like most fitness watches, the mainstream models allow you to monitor the basics such as heart rate, speed, distance covered, calorie intake etc. But what makes Fitbit such a success for me isn’t the technology itself – it is what they have done with the data they are collating.

By building an app and a social network for their users, Fitbit have allowed you to compete against your friends for the amount of steps taken. Such is the impact of this competitive twist, I have noticed many people going deliberately out of their way to “register more steps” in 2017. I have friends who now get off at the train station before their own, just so they can extend their walk home. I even had our Managing Director, Warren Davies, join me on a 7am run in darkest Scotland earlier this month.

All these users have a single achievement in mind – to appear at the top of their respective social leader boards, beating their nearest and dearest. Getting fit becomes a positive by-product and of course ticks the box of the all-important New Year’s resolution. If that isn’t a positive blend of social engineering and technology, I don’t know what is!

TECHNOLOGY IN BUSINESS

This then got me thinking about the use of technology in business. So many times we see technology deployed just for the sake of it and so often we see technology, which is not being used to its full potential, missing that vital link to make it “real” or more human.

Now comes the differentiator. By using Power BI, which is part of Dynamics 365, you can build a dashboard that links with other business systems (such as your customer service tool, Google Analytics or your accounting system) to start making these sales statistics real and relevant to the rest of the business. I have seen companies build leader boards to show how users rank within their teams in terms of closed business deals or customer service (appealing to that competitive edge again). I have also seen deployments that dynamically plot your location on a map and compare it to the location of customers that are hitting your website (to ascertain strategic geographical reach).

It seems there are so many opportunities to simplify what we do and make use of the valuable data and intelligence we hold on our clients. Certainly, with Dynamics 365 and Power BI, there are endless ways to bring data to life and make it more meaningful to the humans that work within an organisation.

The really successful businesses are ones that take this information and make it dance, which of course, all adds to your daily Fitbit step count!