Microsoft studies work roles to boost business productivity
By Kevin Parker, editorial director -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 4/1/2006 7:00:00 AM
Jeff Raikes joined Microsoft when it was a $12-million company with about 100 employees. He went on to become a force behind Microsoft Office, which has approximately 450 million users. Today Raikes is president of the Microsoft Business Division, which, post-reorganization, places Microsoft Office and the Dynamics enterprise applications under a single umbrella responsible for about one-third of the company's revenues.
The issue thereby addressed, said Raikes during his keynote address at Convergence, Microsoft Business Solutions' user conference, is enhancement of business-system productivity through Office integration. Microsoft calls capabilities thereby released as suitable for "people-ready business," which sounds like so much marketing speak, but translates to human capital management—i.e., "extending personal productivity to role productivity to business-process productivity."
The road map for this effort, through 2007, will take full advantage of roles-based Office server portals and collaborative tools, SQL contextual business intelligence reporting, and integration and extensibility through Web services.
Already it's assumed a production manager, for example, has a home page that uses Microsoft SharePoint Services to assemble disparate information needed for the job. Since only about 17 percent of people in the average company access enterprise systems, Outlook users might have CRM system toolbars on their desktops, or display live data from ERP in Excel.
"The future of the digital work style," said Raikes, will be based on unified communications, software services—but not necessarily software as a service—and composite applications.
It's also an attempt to deal with the commonly heard lament, "Why must everything be so difficult?" Complexity is the culprit, and whether because of outsourcing, globalization, or some other, it's only getting worse.
In fact, the idea of increasing complexity in the social evolution of productive forces is hardly novel. Some say that since social evolution can't be said to demonstrate progress or express ideals, it's only universal attribute is increasing complexity.
Microsoft is well aware of the connection between the social sciences and the computer sciences, said Raikes following his address, and employs anthropologists, ethnographers, and others to understand how work gets done—including how unstructured data, such as a Word document, and structured data in transactional systems combine to accomplish a task.
Cary Rohwer, a Microsoft user experience manager for midmarket business solutions, was conducting such studies with Convergence attendees. After more than 1,400 interviews and 280 site visits, the group has defined 61 roles in operations, finance, HR, sales & marketing, and IT at midsize companies.
It actually begins, said Rohwer, by defining "personas." Depending on size and complexity of the company, that persona is split into the necessary number of roles. Context is furnished by defining the roles' inputs and outputs, resulting in 33 processes, 155 subprocesses, and thousands of steps beneath.
Rohwer is particularly pleased that Microsoft has just publicly released a simplified version of the result, and more significantly, that the company is making pervasive use of it during development work.
Microsoft inside?
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