Office Business Applications (repost)
Another way to frame the Results Gap problem is to look at what is missing when it comes to user productivity. People use powerful but simple to use tools such as spreadhseets to analyze information and make decisions. Much of this limited to local and personal use and they deal with same clunky interfaces have a significantly less productive experience when the use LOB or their enteprise systems. We call this 'The Last Mile of Productivity' problem, the powerful tools and technologies that makes users producitve when it comes to personal use has not reached their business use of systems.
So, how do we fill the Results Gap and bridge the 'Last Mile of Productivity'. I believe a new breed of business applications are needed that extend the capbilities of LOB systems but allow people to user powerful tools to consume information and make decisions.
These business apps:
· Easy to use – allow users to use familiar and powerful Office clients for information consumption
· Role-Based – are not one-size-fits-all, but have role specific interfaces for greater productivity and decision making
· Collaborative – are collaborative, allowing people-to-people interactions, and address the ad-hoc business activity surrounding a business process
· Configurable – are highly customizable, by end users and IT alike. As the business landscape changes decision makers can customize these apps to adapt and enable the change
· Contextual – allow users to make decisions in the context of business problem(s) they are working on
We call these Office Business Applications. The investments Microsoft has made with the 2007 Office System not only provide a unfied and much richer client experience but also server side capabilities, such as workflow, analysis service and backend data connectivity.
Please visit the newly launced Office Business Applications Developer Portal and look at whitepape on LOBi. We will talk more in my next post. As always, your comments and feedback is welcome!
