- THE BI Blog : Tracking Swine Flu with Microsoft Virtual Earth and Live Search
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I'm quite certain that more people are trying to cure Swine Flu than will every catch it. I'm also reasonably certain I'll end up regretting saying that.
However, its interesting to see how a multitude of more modern technology is being applied to the issue.
We can see from the Microsoft Virtual Earth heatmap that statistical data takes on a completely new life when combined with geographical data:
Microsoft Live Search Maps highlights reported cases
Virtual Earth Swine Flu Mashup
This concept is not entirely new in the world of BI. Indeed, visual representations of statistical data is a big part of what modern BI is all about.
It also highlights the value of giving BI to everyone. The more people looking at this data, the more potential solutions.
It makes sense therefore to think about the possibilities that adding a communications and collaboration platform alongside the BI solution so that those looking at the problem in different ways can discuss it and work together to solve it.
Are all of your employees able to look at your critical business problems together? Are they all able to get all the available and relevant insight? Are they able to discuss it and work together on ways to solve it?
Its not a huge leap for the imagination to draw a line between the threat Swine Flu poses to world health and the threat the financial crisis posed to the World economy.
THE BI Blog : Tracking Swine Flu with Microsoft Virtual Earth and Live Search
- Productivity, Innovation at the NHS - Windows Live
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Some interesting insights from Dan Rasmus on Productivity, Efficiency and Patient Care at the NHS.
Measuring productivity gains in meaningful and tangible business oriented outcomes is an ongoing challenge.
"It isn’t good enough to create correlations informed by intuition. We need to understand where productivity morphs into something else and we need to be able to put a name on that and understand its attributes so that we can more effectively craft the business environments of the knowledge economy."
Dan takes the angle that measuring the outputs of productivity are different in the knowledge economy in contrast to the industrial age. It's not all about doing more, or doing the same things better. In some case it can be both and in many cases its about doing things entirely differently.
Productivity, Innovation at the NHS - Windows Live
- Is SharePoint the right investment, right now?
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This article from freshbusinessthinking.com would suggest it could be.
http://www.freshbusinessthinking.com/business_advice.php?AID=2375&Title=SharePoint+Steers+Companies+Through+Economic+Downturn
SharePoint forms the cornerstone of Microsoft's Business Productivity Infrastructure. It delivers the foundation for Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Search and Enterprise Content Management solutions from Microsoft. Having all of these capabilities delivered by one product makes SharePoint a fantastic opportunity to get a lot of ROI in a lot of places with one single investment.
The challenge, however, is understanding which challenges to address with SharePoint first.
This whitepaper tells the tale of a few customers who have used SharePoint to help them save money. Perhaps one of them is the inspiration you've been looking for.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=6c9db923-139c-4d0c-8111-a6b8c9478c1b
- Two birds with one stone
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If there are two things we're all desperate to save right now it is money and the environment.
How fortunate it is, therefore, that by enabling the workforce to work from any place and at any time Unified Communications technology can save both travel expenses and the associated carbon emissions.
The UC team have prepared this whitepaper to help understand the magnitude of savings on offer:
Achieving Cost and Resource Savings with UC White Paper
- THE BI Blog : Microsoft Business Intelligence Vision and Strategy Slides
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I think our BI vision is one of the most clearly defined market visions Microsoft has. I also think that it is a market where we can really add value and change the dynamics of the market.
Making BI commercially viable enough for every employee to utilize it is a key factor.
This deck is much recommended reading (and for good measure it is only 12 slides long - also a fantastic achievement for a Microsoft marketing division...)
THE BI Blog : Microsoft Business Intelligence Vision and Strategy Slides
- THE BI Blog : Top 10 demos for Microsoft BI
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Somehow the BI team seem to corner some of our most exciting demos. Thanks to Nic for compiling this top-ten list in one place. http://blogs.msdn.com/bi/archive/2009/04/23/top-10-demos-for-microsoft-bi.aspx
As a side note, its worth noting that the best demos show how combining BI with other Business Productivity capabilities makes the whole activity so much more valuable (and the demo that bit cooler...)
THE BI Blog : Top 10 demos for Microsoft BI
- Recession, recalibration or reset?
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While no one is under any doubt whether that we are now experiencing a set of economic conditions we have not experienced for a generation (if not more), there is a growing debate on the nature of these conditions and for how long we should plan for "recovery".
This article captures the mood quite well:
The way your business generates results is different, now.
Your customers think differently, now.
Your customers care about different things, now.
Your customers act differently, now.
Your customers may actually be different people, now.
Customers aren’t disposable anymore; more than ever, you have to create sustainable customer relationships.
Everything is different now.
Microsoft's current business outlook is one of an economic reset. We're not sure that we've reached the bottom and even if we have, we don't expect to bounce back to the level of supposed economic prosperity we enjoyed a year or so ago.
So what should we all do in the interim? Clearly doing nothing is not an option, but with all the uncertainty what are the right steps to take?
According to Steve Ballmer, prior experience would suggest that it is the companies who invest in the trends that transcend economic cycles and will extend well into the future. For RCA during the Great Depression it was investing in television. For Microsoft it is investing in Software + Services. Regardless of the economic conditions that shift is going to take place and one way to look at it is that we have no choice but to invest in that. Microsoft's future prosperity will depend on being as successful in delivering Software + Services as we have in delivering Software for the past 30 odd years. The economy may take a year or 10 years to recover, but we won't be in the game if we haven't invested in Software + Services.
Other businesses are faced with similar industry shifts. Whether it is green alternatives to current transportation or a completely new landscape for financial services the innovator's dilemma pervades. That disruptive innovation still lurks. The real decision for most businesses is not by how much they reduce costs, it is whether they have taken their eye off of the disruptive influences in their market.
Unsurprisingly, technology has a key role to play in forming and executing these decisions. The vision for Business Productivity Infrastructure is to bring together the necessary information work tools that enable each individual to inform the decision process, collaborate effectively to ensure absolute customer focus and enable the organization as a whole to remain agile and responsive to a turbulent market.
In this cost focused world the one thing no company can afford is to have inefficient tools shackling the organization to outdated and ineffective behaviors.
tompeters! management consulting leadership training development project management
- How CIOs Are Setting IT Strategy Amid Economic Uncertainty -- IT And The Economy -- InformationWeek
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With the endless resurrection of the "ghosts of 1929" I'm starting to believe that even the dead have failed to miss the economic events of the past few weeks.
Typically, in times of economic uncertainty and downturn, IT braces itself for an uncomfortable series of budget cuts.
The mood this time seems notably calmer.
Is this a broad acceptance of the inevitable? "When aren't I faced with cuts?"
Perhaps. Whatever your view, now is the time to start pitching IT as the opportunity to be the strategic driving force that will not only keep your organization safe, but help it take advantages of the growth opportunities that appear as the market starts to recover (an ever braver premise, I know...).
InformationWeek has some useful pointers:
- Have a playbook.
Emerson Electric's business planning includes creating "playbooks" that anticipate changing events, and IT follows a similar process. CIO Steve Hassell says the key is a "balanced portfolio of projects" prioritized by a variety of factors--cost, resources, technology, time frame, risk--so managers can see their choices as business conditions change.
- Not the same old drill.
Three to five years ago, options such as cloud computing and software as a service didn't exist, says Shaklee CIO Ken Harris. But they take time to put in place. Which is why Harris' IT team is evaluating them now, in case a tougher economic climate forces spending cuts and new approaches. "If and when things tighten, it will likely happen quickly," he says.
- Rogues are reality.
At Lauth, Ton knows his smaller IT team can't respond as fast as he'd like, so business units may start rogue projects outside IT. "Some of that you might have to 'allow,' to let the business go forward, but you don't want it to run rampant," he says.
- Fine-tune.
Spectrum Laboratory Network, a medical lab group, has been growing 20% or more annually for years. But seeing a slight downturn in physician office visits, CIO David Moore is edging back some capital spending, pushing into next year upgrades to some 4-year-old servers. Emerson is continuing long-term strategic projects, including a global data center consolidation, but it's "biasing" its new-project selection over the next few quarters toward shorter-duration, lower-risk projects so the company can respond quickly to economic changes, Hassell says.
- Honestly assess the company's attitude toward IT.
Is IT a competitive advantage, where spending can help with business problems related to tightening credit and cash flow? Carl Weddle, IT director at Quality Trailer Products, knows the company sees IT mostly as a cost to be contained in a slowdown, so he gets why his team is being pushed to finish projects without additional funding, and why no new hires are likely. "It is hunker-down time," he says.
The fantastic thing about IT, is the pace of innovation allows us to spend to save in ways we can't do with other investment. Better management tools reduce the IT administration and management overheads (TCO). Productivity innovation enables organizations to maximize their human asset. In growth periods this maximizes the ability to seize the opportunity, in downturns this helps to do the same with much less - maximizing efficiency. Maybe regardless of the situation you want to do both. Whichever your strategy, IT can drive success.
The problem is risk. IT has the potential to solve all, but the success rate is poor.
We hope with the Infrastructure Optimization model, the IP we've gathered and the investment we've made globally we can minimize that risk using methods we've proved to work.
BPIO is our focus on people productivity. There hasn't been a time for more than two generations that you'll be so dependent on your people to deliver like they've never delivered before.
IT Optimization could be what defines your organization's future.
How CIOs Are Setting IT Strategy Amid Economic Uncertainty -- IT And The Economy -- InformationWeek
- Seth's Blog: The growing productivity divide
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Seth calls out a number of functions that most people could use to become more productive.
Seth calls these out to call people to learn how to use the technology at their fingertips.
He asks "Can you imagine someone who works in a factory that processes metal not knowing how to use a blowtorch?"
Helping your people get the most from their technology is critical. It's a shame that it's often the training budget that gets cut first.
Also critical to closing the "productivity divide" is making sure that your people have the technology they need. It might be hard to imagine a factory worker who couldn't use a blowtorch, harder still to imagine a factory that didn't provision its workers with blowtorches.
To find out where your organization could close the productivity divide, why not try completing our self-assessment: http://www.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/about/gettingstarted.mspx
(Look out for the new short-assessment due for release in mid-November)
Seth's Blog: The growing productivity divide
- Not that we haven't been saying it all along but...
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"BI applications do not exist in isolation - they are an integral part of what Forrester calls Information Workplace, which involves many other applications such as collaboration, portals, search, office applications and others. While many BI vendors provide seamless integration with office applications like spreadsheets and word processors, www.panoramasoftware.com delivers BI integration with email and instant messaging. And what application is more widely used and more mission critical in any enterprise than email?"
http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2008/10/bi-crystal-ball.html
To be fair, Forrester's "Information Workplace" term has probably been knocking around longer than BPI.
This is a fantastic example of why BPI is an important focus for maximizing ROI on IT. By investing in tools like BI, Search and Communications separately, organizations fail to maximize the benefit of the big picture.
Boris is quite correct, BI does not exist in isolation. I would, however, like to point out that Microsoft also provides seamless interoperability with spreadsheets, word processors, email, instant messaging, voice, presence, search, portals, collaboration, content management... we call it BPI!
- Gemini Announcements
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You can check out the full release on our next wave of BI here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-06BI08PR.mspx
It's great to see this kind of vision so early. And it's also incredibly timely.
If the credit crisis has taught us anything it is how a lack of knowledge and a lack of transparency can destroy confidence between a business and its investors/customers.
Our vision for pervasive BI is to enable all employees at all levels to have incredibly powerful insight at their fingertips.
But that's not all. Equally important are (from the press-release):
- Lower TCO. Ability to utilize existing investments in SQL Server, SharePoint and Office and drive end-user adoption to dramatically bring down per-user costs and generate unprecedented economies
- Rapid deployment and faster time-to-benefits. Easy onramp to powerful BI capabilities embedded within the everyday productivity tools employees already use, promoting wide end-user adoption
- Freeing up IT to act as a true strategic differentiator. Empowering information workers to quickly access information and perform their own analysis with minimal hand-holding from IT enables IT staff to concentrate their efforts where they can have the most strategic value for the business.
- Powerful synergies with other Microsoft applications. Ability to deploy the unified communications capabilities within Office Communications Server, for example, to nimbly act on BI-generated insights and “spread the wealth” with co-workers, customers, partners and suppliers
- THE BI Blog : Boris Evelson of Forrester looks into his Crystal Ball and sees Gemini
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The BI Team are having something of an exciting week this week at the BI Conference.
There have been a number of exciting announcements this week and it's great to see this kind of recognition from Forrester.
One of the most important aspects of any BI solution is the ability to take the insight that analytics and scorecarding gives you and be able to communicate and affect change. This is one of the key strengths of Microsoft's BI solution - the surrounding Business Productivity capabilities.
THE BI Blog : Boris Evelson of Forrester looks into his Crystal Ball and sees Gemini
- Jason Langridge's WebLog - MR Mobile! : Nearly half of Britons suffer "discomgoogolation"
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Nearly half of Britons -- 44 percent -- are discomgoogolation sufferers, according to a survey, with over a quarter -- 27 percent -- admitting to rising stress levels when they are unable to go online.
Interesting statistics. It appears that not having access to technology we depend on actually creates physiological side-effects. In the same context, with reference to "Software Consumerization", I wonder whether people experience real distress when they come into work and can't use the technology they feel to be key to their work life?
Jason Langridge's WebLog - MR Mobile! : Nearly half of Britons suffer "discomgoogolation"
- //steve clayton: geek in disguise : Unilever staff use Facebook
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Another good spot from Steve.
I blogged about Software Consumarization before. The Unilever example is not atypical. Businesses from all walks of life are finding it challenging to integrate a digitally enabled workforce into an organization viewed by that workforce as digitally disabled.
Call them Gen-Y, Digital Natives, Millennials, whatever you want - a changing workforce has changing expectations. I personally don't believe in such classifications (I am one of the so-called Gen-Y workers) as I think technology driven/enabled changes in lifestyles are a constant change. And that change is increasing in velocity.
Meeting the expectations of a fresh workforce is becoming increasingly difficult.
There's understandable inertia to much of this "technology populism" (as coined by Forrester). Much of it is due to a clash of cultures. Many business leaders would consider Instant Messaging or Social Computing as anti-productivity tools. This is an understandable viewpoint. But it is driven by an industrial-age view of productivity and it's value. It's an industrial view that says that if you are not sat at your desk (or your machine) you are not making things and you are not creating value. Time spent talking (on the phone, IM or at the water cooler) is not productive. I've heard many customers say exactly that.
"What's the point in me creating an extra x minutes a week of time savings? That just means people will spend more time stood by the water cooler".
Perhaps.
But maybe that's exactly what they ought to be doing. My team's made most of the progress in our work through chance encounters with people by the coffee machine. When I develop an idea, most of that development is driven by ad-hoc conversations with people I happen to bump into. I'm also far more likely to bounce an idea off of people I know, on a personal level. After all, team-building days are not new. It's well recognized that a team that works well on a personal/social level works well on a professional level.
So why are personal/social computing tools resisted?
Inertia. Change is difficult.
And there's clash of cultures.
Perhaps Einstein put it best: "I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity."
It's not the first time that differing cultures and expectations have collided. There was significant upheaval in labor practice over the first 50-60 years of the 20th century. The expectations of the workforce shifted towards ideas of fairness and equality and a more respectful employer-employee relationship. That was a tough change.
When the telephone entered the office it was viewed as a distraction. So was the computer, the Internet and e-mail. Now they are widely accepted essentials.
Now social and consumer technology is entering the workplace.
'At Unilever, half of the desktop software and services used by employees comes from outside the company, and a lot of it shouldn't be there—Skype (EBAY) and iTunes, to name just a couple. "We can't stop them," says Chris Turner, Unilever's chief technology officer. "They're not accepting no as an answer."'
It's perfectly understandable to fear this "infestation" of non-corporate technology. The productivity "benefits" aside, the compliancy and regulatory difficulties made possible through consumer technology are chilling.
But consider the benefits first. These tools aren't popular because they change the way "young people" or "Gen-Y" thinks. They are popular because they compliment exactly the way we think. Human beings are classed as social mammals. We are more like dogs than cats. We evolved as a species to work together, for our own protection and for our own advancement. This is stone-age instinct being leveraged by a digital age.
Using non-corporate technology always carries risk. Compliance and security just two of them. But don't resist the idea of social computing purely because it conjures the image of Facebook and Live Messenger. Corporate social computing is a reality, and a reality made available in BPI.
'Unilever is still testing how to give employees more digital freedom. It may move users outside the corporate firewall and allow them to connect via their own computers, provided they're using certain security technologies. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the savings could be millions of dollars. "We see this as a real opportunity to start altering the cost model to deliver IT," says Turner.'
Henry Ford is famous for the expression "we don't pay you to think". Well thinking is pretty much the core of what I get paid to do. Some of that comes out in this blog, some of it through our campaigns, some of it in helping others to solve their own puzzles. Most of your workforce is probably in the business of thinking also. Help them think together.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_34/b4097065813253.htm
//steve clayton: geek in disguise : Unilever staff use Facebook
- CIOs On Cloud Computing - Cloud Computing Blog - InformationWeek
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There's been much press on this lately.
We've long held that whilst there's a future in cloud computing and software-as-a-service, the current limitations in reliability and privacy mean a pure-play cloud solution is unlikely to ever be truly viable.
That's why we prefer the software+services model. Giving choice between hosted and on-premise should ensure we get the best of both worlds.
CIOs On Cloud Computing - Cloud Computing Blog - InformationWeek
