Dynamics Groundhog Day
Since we announced the 2 wave Dynamics strategy (Project Green back then) a regular part of my role is to present the strategy to our customers and partners. We have a compelling story that’s been well considered, placing us in a position of thought leadership in the business applications market. A year in and I’m still giving the same presentation albeit with updated slides to reflect branding changes and some cool new graphics (we have great slideware!) . For some people who’ve seen the presentation a few times it must be getting a little repetitive as it hasn’t changed very much. This is a good thing. The main difference for someone seeing the presentation 1 year ago and now is progress.
I recently had the pleasure of seeing Doug Burghum present at a meeting in Fargo and he made a great point that much of the work we’ve been doing is analogous to the construction of an oil rig where most of the initial work is underwater, hence no-one sees your progress. To continue with the analogy, I really get the feeling that we’re coming above the water line with Dynamics. We’re making great headway in delivering the strategy and seeing the fruits is really exciting. There are so many elements that are going to change the way people use business applications. Our advances will be about delivering applications that people want to use to help their everyday jobs rather that becoming another piece of admin. Areas such as the new client, contextual BI, office integration and the web services infrastructure will give our users a great experience with applications they enjoy using. We’ve had some independent validation by Forrester that we’re making progress stating that “With its financial strength, ubiquitous Office environment and improving analytics capabilities, Microsoft is in a unique position to redefine business application usability, and is doing so.”
I hope that I continue to give the same presentation for a little while to come. While it may sometimes feel like Groundhog Day when I deliver the presentation, it’s good to know that we got the strategy right at the start. There’s a lot of very cool stuff coming in the next year and Dynamics is an exciting place to be.
Let me know what you think.
