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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel validated!

"Banning Facebook and the like goes against the grain of how people want to interact. Often people are friends with colleagues through these networks and it is how some develop their relationships."

Using technology to build closer links with ex-employees and potential customers could also boost productivity, innovation and create a more democratic working environment, Mr Bradwell added.

"In today's difficult business environment, the instinctive reaction can be to batten down the hatches and return to the traditional command-and-control techniques that enable managers to closely monitor and measure productivity.

"Allowing workers to have more freedom and flexibility might seem counter-intuitive, but it appears to create businesses more capable of maintaining stability."

 

steve clayton- geek in disguise - Unilever staff use Facebook

BBC NEWS | Business | Bosses 'should embrace Facebook'

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

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"

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

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

I'm a little tardy picking this one up...

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/07/business_intell_2.html?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_ALL

... but I love stories like this. BI is very much a productivity exercise.  In this case it's more about productivity than it is about business insight and performance.

"district managers, who typically run eight to 12 restaurants, were spending as much as two hours every morning going through e-mails, voice mails, spreadsheets, etc. 'They'd spend a significant amount of time getting that [data] together,' Valle says, 'and then another half hour doing something with it.'"

That final statement is notable. "doing something about it". In this case acting on insight is a focal point. More of a focal point than gathering and understand the data to any level of scientific detail.

Implementing productivity as infrastructure gives us the flexibility to "do the BI" and then "do the collaboration".

It's a shame they're using Cognos, but hey, at least they have SQL at the back-end :)

Business Intelligence Is Not An Oxymoron - CIOs Uncensored Blog - InformationWeek

Good find by Jason.

In line with my previous post, customers have far greater expectations on how rapidly organizations can react to their needs. That can range from delivering a product to replying to e-mail.

One very powerful tool that BPI offers is the delivery of that information directly to all levels of the organization.

The hardest thing about answering an e-mail is generally finding the answer to the question the sender asked. If it's not at your fingertips the asynchronous nature of e-mail allows us to postpone our response and procrastinate in a way the phone doesn't allow us. That's not to say that we're not under the same strain on the phone. It is costly to spend any more time than is necessary on the phone, and doesn't leave customers any more satisfied either.

BPI can help get important information to everyone's fingertips. Customer's expect your organization to have that capability.

Jason Langridge's WebLog - MR Mobile! : How quickly do you expect a response on email?

In IBM's "The Enterprise of the Future" there is a profile of "financial outperformers" and "underperformers" driven by research from the Global CEO Study series. This is accompanied by the statement "financial outperformers are making bolder plays".

Thus the piece defines the "Enterprise of the Future" as:

• Hungry for change
• Innovative beyond customer imagination
• Globally Integrated
• Disruptive by nature
• Genuine, not just generous

This got me thinking: most of these are risky pursuits. Certainly innovating beyond your customer's imagination carries the risk that you innovate beyond your customer's needs and end up with rather arbitrary products.

Statistically, however, it would seem that the most successful companies are the ones who thrust themselves into those risks.

Einstein is quoted as saying that ideas are "1% inspiration, 99% perspiration". We can liken this to modern innovation and maintaining competitive edge - "1% inspiration, 99% waste and junk". Most investors would probably bet against those odds, but it's just those odds that are separating the successful with the not-so-successful.

Most of this is driven by an industrial-era view of manufacturing. Customers are asked for their requirements, products and services are designed and defined both those requirements and then the product is built.

That's not fast enough in the digital age.

Products need to be "innovative beyond customer imagination".

There maybe some salvation for the risk-wary, particularly in the treacherous economic waters that lay ahead.

Customers are keener than ever, and - thanks to the web - more able than ever to be involved in defining and expressing their preferences. This ranges from broad and far-reaching reviews of what they like and do not like (read blogs, Amazon reviews, community sites - Apple iPhone?) to actual collaborating with their vendors in the innovation process.

Many pharmaceutical companies now take an "open source" approach to drugs manufacturing. Pools of global talent are wielded into the design process. The Nintendo Wii console is cited as being designed with just this sort of open approach. Communities of gamers were involved in the development, tantalized by early releases and other incentives into offering "sage" like advice to Nintendo.

This de-risks everything. Although we still need to be "disruptive", "hungry for change" and "innovating beyond customer imagination" we can do so iteratively. We can involve customers every step of the way, offering them the chance to define their products. This transparency also brings customers closer to your brand.

So what does any of this have to do with BPI?

In order to manage all this effort, organizations need to have visibility into this process. Employees need to have a view and be made aware of how well their "innovations" are performing in real-time. Then they need to communicate and collaborate quickly and effectively between themselves, partners and engage with customer communities.

BPI is the infrastructure for enabling the rapid reactions and change that the Enterprise of the Future will need.