Office 2016: Reinventing productivity and business processes

[Guest Satya Nadella]

How people work has changed dramatically. But one constant is that everyone wants to get more out of every moment of their life — after all, our time is the scarcest commodity.

 

That’s why Microsoft has set a bold ambition to reinvent productivity and business process in this mobile-first, cloud-first world. Today’s release of Office 2016 is a big step forward. We designed it to help change the nature of work within organizations of all sizes across three key dimensions.

 

First, work requires mobility of the human experience, not the device. Your work cannot be bound to any one device or location. You must be able to get anything done on any device you choose, anywhere you choose.

 

Second, conversations are the new platform for getting work done. You need the solutions that enable you to collaborate toward shared outcomes with colleagues and partners who are in different time zones, working on different devices, in different apps and different work artifacts. Conversations are the true driver of productivity.

 

Third, productivity requires a rich service spanning all your work and work artifacts (documents, communications, and business process events and tasks). It is no longer bound to any single application. It’s a service that leverages the cumulative intelligence and knowledge you and your organization need to drive productivity.

 

Mobility. Conversations. Intelligence. This is why Office has transformed from a familiar set of tools like Word, PowerPoint and Excel to a new way to work together on the fly with new solutions like OneDrive, Sway, Sunrise, Wunderlist, Outlook, Skype, Yammer, Delve and Power BI. By subscribing to Office 365, customers get continuously updated and enhanced apps and services for use across their devices. And while Office helps more than a billion people collaborate persistently and securely on the device and platform of their choice, we will continue to set the bar high for our industry by delivering innovation that is uniquely differentiated and integrated across Windows, Office and innovative devices such as Surface.

 

 

Customers who are pushing the boundaries to transform themselves and their industries are proving that these productivity trends and our Office solutions are highly relevant. Rent the Runway is an innovative business with a disruptive vision for every woman to have a subscription to fashion. Its entrepreneurs see Office as a universal language for their company to fuel collaboration with their team across a range of devices and for data-driven decisions about their inventory as they ship more than 10,000 designer dresses every hour.

 

Our ambition to reinvent productivity includes reinventing business process. In the past, these processes were rigid, imposed and inflexible. Office and Microsoft Dynamics are changing the game with solutions that make business processes a catalyst to organizational productivity.

 

O’Neal Steel, a large U.S. metals company, exemplifies how Dynamics CRM Online and Office 365 have created a more fluid, flexible business process. Salespeople now can track relationship building more accurately and flag prospective customers for follow up. Our solution has enabled all employees to access complete, up-to-date information no matter where they are, using familiar software. They’ve seen lead conversion rates grow from about 2 percent to 30 percent — resulting in consistently higher sales.

 

Our new Office and Dynamics products and services are striving to build a new productivity and business process system that any organization can use to harness the power of human networks, respond to business events in real time, and find and share data insights as businesses create more information than they can consume. We will continue to build out this system with a broad platform and partnership approach to meet the needs of our customers.

 

All this technological advancement is meant to empower people and organizations to achieve more. Which means that technology is not the ultimate answer but a catalyst for the broader cultural change in how we work and its impact on outcomes we achieve. We look forward to celebrating your ingenuity and success with your products and services!

 

Satya

 

Continue reading...