Erika Morphy of CRM Buyer has an article about the deployment of CRM analytics in the pharmaceutical industry.  My colleague Ted Snyder mentions some of the challenges that deployment of analytics helps these organizations address:

Pharma companies are also applying analytics to more basic, competitive issues, Snyder said. "They want to be able to react quickly to events. Scheduling something like a product launch is never a sure thing, because you can never depend on an approval's timing."

On the other hand, if an already-approved product comes under review by the Food and Drug Administration, pharma companies need to be able to react with as much data on hand as possible, he continued.

In these scenarios, "a lot of data needs to be analyzed very quickly. Then they have to execute on that strategy and enable their sales force appropriately," Snyder explained. Ancillary applications like call planning and and territory realignment come into play as well.

A speedy analytics process has become a competitive advantage for these firms, he said. "Now they can analyze data within days instead of weeks."

It's pretty clear that challenges like the ones that Ted describes aren't unique to the pharmaceutical industry.  To my mind, CRM is one of the best cases for user-friendly analytics.  In many situations, it's not necessary to build sophisticated models, it would be enough just to know which deals have changed status in the week, or to know which customers are your most frequent buyers.  Often that's much more difficult than it should be.  In the context of CRM what's often most important is being able to shift gears quickly and answer questions as they arise from analysis, and this tends to be better addressed by interactive visualization than statistical or predictive analytics.