MBS Technology Roadmap - Convergence & Beyond

The Microsoft Business Solutions R&D team has many exciting initiatives planned for 2005 and beyond. I’m excited to share these plans with you in this series of blogs. I look forward to getting your feedback as we jump into this discussion together.

Microsoft’s vision for business applications remains focused on breakthrough innovation that delivers rich functionality with high adaptability at lower costs. We call this breakthrough “Affordable Adaptability” and it’s centered on both a people and process-centric application design delivered through a model-driven approach.

It seems like an impossible dilemma.  How can we drive costs out of deploying a business management application while at the same time delivering a richer set of functionality that is highly adaptable to our partners and our customers?  There are different claimants out there in the market.  Some are taking enterprise ERP technology and putting a middleware layer on top of it, but selling enterprise middleware to the middle market is the surest way to increase cost without delivering additional value. Some others are offering hosted model with extremely limited customization.

The key to delivering on the vision of “Affordable Adaptability” is to bridge the gap between company’s “business model” and “software model”. Business applications are about making people more effective in conducting business processes. When businesses talk about enabling more self service for their customers, partners and employees, being more responsive to demand in their supply and delivery chains and their reporting and consolidation needs in the world of increasing compliance requirements – they are in effect talking about the increasing levels of constant change in their people’s roles and business processes. This in turns means that for businesses to get benefits out of their business application investments, these applications need to be much more flexible and resilient to change. To meet this need we are pioneering the shift towards a more model driven approach in business applications.  The idea is to reflect more of the business model in the software model so that when changes happen within the organization or its business processes, the software can adapt to these changes much more easily and affordably.

We will deliver these innovations, referred to as “Project Green”, in two waves of upgrades to all our major business management product lines. The first wave, which will ship between 2005 and 2007, includes a common user experience, portal, business intelligence integration, and web services layer.  The second wave, which starts shipping in 2008, builds on the first wave and will extend the model-driven approach to finer grain business processes and help lower costs even further.

Richer functionality.  Higher adaptability.  Lower costs.  How can Microsoft do this?

It all starts with people for us at Microsoft. As part of Green we had extended 1-on-1 conversations with over 2,000 business people from around the world: CEOs, marketing VPs, sales people, accountants, warehouse workers, you name the job, we talked to them, observed them doing their work, and more importantly, we listened. The resounding feedback was that they wanted their business management software to be more intuitive and organized around their specific role and tasks. We heard again and again comments like “If I am an operations manager, why don’t I get an Operations Manager desktop that just shows me what I need to do my job.” We clearly needed to figure out a way to empower users in doing their work more efficiently, by making business management applications easy to use surfacing the richer functionality and easier adaptability.

The second thing we heard is that people connect and collaborate in the context of their work. We came across a number of customers that are switching from using fax to using email as the main technology for connecting and transacting with their customers and suppliers, so we will build much easier transactional email support into the first wave of releases.  And we plan to make it easier to build and use collaboration portals.

Gaining insight from business management applications is something everyone we talked to prioritized. At the basic level users want a more intuitive way to “look inside the business”. They wanted applications to bring them closer to their operations such as alerts that can help them handle exceptions or better yet act on business events even before they become exceptions. Customers also want very flexible reporting. It is amazing to see how many times they refer to Microsoft Excel when trying to create and visualize reports.  

These first three design themes - Empowered Users, Connected, and Insightful -- are all about making people more productive. This bringing together of structured (Microsoft Business Solutions) and unstructured work (Microsoft Office) is something Microsoft can uniquely do. We are especially excited to be announcing at Convergence that the next wave of MBS business management applications will make individual users much more productive.  Specifically, this wave of innovation will include a breakthrough User Experience based around ~50 configurable roles. Contextual Business Intelligence, including a common configurable reporting environment based on SQL Reporting Services enabling easier report creation and distribution. Portals, including a common configurable and secure Intranet/Extranet environment based on SharePoint enabling new levels of collaboration within and across companies.

Once we move beyond end user productivity, here is another very common situation we encounter again and again in our interviews.  We’d be sitting in a manager’s office at a customer site, and 45 minutes into the interview they would get up and go to the whiteboard, draw a picture of their organization and then draw some process flows through it and say “this is the software I really want.”  We realized that most business people have a model of their company in their head, and they want their business management software to map to and change with this model.  We call this Adaptive Process which we enable through model driven development approach.

This idea of model-driven development has been a dream in the software industry for a long time; what makes Microsoft think we can deliver it to business applications now? Well, for starters, we need a set of integration standards that make it easier for the building blocks of an application to be assembled into process flows.  The web services stack addresses this need quite nicely. Industry analysts are starting to call the use of web services in process-based applications “Service Oriented Architecture” or SOA.

For the first wave of releases we are building Web Services interoperability layer based on ASMX/Indigo, enabling applications to integrate and also the development of composite applications to support cross-company and cross-module processes.  

To drive further ease of use and affordability, we want to scale the scope of our models to include declarative descriptions of our business process that today is encapsulated in code. In doing so we are capturing the “best of” process knowledge from across all our product lines and building them into a software model that in effect will converge the business logic code across our product lines as well. 

In first wave of releases we will start by abstracting out workflows. Subsequent to that in the second wave of releases we will move to even finer grain levels of the model wherein we will start to tackle the more tricky issues of complex flows, exception paths and also differences in planning vs. execution time. A good starting point for much of this repository thinking is the Axapta AOT which already is the most advanced model driven application development environment on the market today. To do more of this process modeling we are working closely with our colleagues in our Platforms and Visual Studio team (which now includes the Microsoft Business Framework team) to drive modeling tools, repositories and also runtime support for process execution. One of the key goals here is to deliver visual designers for process modeling for business analysts and not just programmers, much like we will do in Microsoft CRM for Workflow.

All of these Green themes -- Empowered Users, Connected, Insightful, and Adaptive Processes – won’t mean anything to customers unless they combine to change the fundamental cost structure of business management applications.  So our fifth and sixth themes are centered on TCO and what we refer to as Fundamentals. With TCO we are laser focused on reducing the cost of evaluating, installing, configuring, and upgrading our software. And with Fundamentals we will continuously strive to front load our development process (i.e. design phase) with customer centricity, quality, reliability and security. The customer centricity is not just driven by qualitative customer feedback loops that we all know about, but by increasing levels of instrumentation in code we are implementing using Watson technology in our products.

So in case you have been wondering what’s going on with Project Green, well, this is it. Breakthrough innovations that deliver on the vision of “Affordable Adaptability” across two waves of upgrades for all our major product lines. In the first wave we will focus on breakthroughs in delivering a common user experience across our product lines. In the second wave we will innovate on new process modeling and execution technology and as a result start to build a “best of” process suite. Beyond these technology waves, we have several innovations in the pipeline to do with actual process flows and applications in the categories of CRM, SCM and ERM and I will cover more of this in future blogs.

Adaptability of business applications from end user roles to process flows (people + process) in support of business model change is what we believe is the next frontier of business application innovation. Microsoft is uniquely positioned to bring superior user experience and platform along with applications that address the specific needs of our target markets to lead this wave of innovation. 

Lots to discuss. Please send your feedback, questions or comments. It’s that broad connection with customers and partners that helps fuel the energy and drives us each day.

Cheers,

Satya

PS: I promise to make the next blog a lot shorter J