Optimize your operations & Transform your products

Three key areas to realize our mission in this mobile-first, cloud-first world:

1) Create more personal computing – Computing is all around us, and it’s only going to become a more ubiquitous part of our lives as we look forward, e.g. explosion of sensors, proliferation of small and large screens, and continued emergence of devices like HoloLens that blend digital content and the real world.

The mobility of the human experience across all of this computing is what truly matters – the ability for your applications and data to transcend all of this computing, not the mobility of one device…an approach reflected in our strategy with Windows 10 to build one platform that spans devices.

2)  Reinvent productivity & business processes – Despite the abundance of technology, human attention and time remains scarce. This ambition speaks to our goal to help reclaim that that time through the alignment and reinvention of productivity tools and business processes that reclaim time by shifting focus to the things that matter most to you and your organization.

3)  Build the intelligent cloud platform – We often describe data as the new currency for business, which essentially speaks to an organization’s ability to convert their data assets into intelligence that can yield insights to inform the appropriate action.

Analyst firm IDC forecasts that by 2020 there will be nearly 45 zettabytes of data, or almost 20,000 times the total amount of data that existed in the world less than three decades before.

Most of this data will reside in the cloud as the only practical place to combine and manage the influx of data – providing the ability to pull together data across disparate and diverse sources, and to reason over large-scale data in order to turn it into intelligence. Additionally, the cloud enables speed and agility like never before and the platform to fuel rich experiences across an organization’s systems, critical apps and services.

Digital Transformation

We are similarly impacted and experiencing our own digital transformation. The three interconnected ambitions represent more than our ambitions – they are our response to this imperative to transform and designed to help our customers deliver transformation within their organization.

First you need to be able to ask and answer two key questions as part of your digital transformation:

How is your business being changed by digital technology?

How is your core business model being changed by digital technology?

Systems of Intelligence

Slide objective: Assert a systems-based approach to digital transformation, i.e. systems of intelligence

Answering these questions requires the mindset of a digital company...a way of operating like a digital company beyond procuring and deploying individual solutions – such as CRM, ERP or even office automation solutions – that is instead anchored on building systems of intelligence.

Systems of intelligence represent the digital feedback loops that help you draw better insight out of data and convert it to intelligent action – engage with your customers, empower your employees, optimize your operations, and reinvent products and business models.

Previously businesses designed, built, produced and shipped a product, then customers bought it. That was the end of the cycle. Now organizations are building in continuous feedback loops – sensors in product, after-market services, customer feedback from a variety of channels.

Transformation requires these rich systems of intelligence. And it isn’t simply about technology…systems of intelligence represent the combination of technology, people and process that enable these feedback loops, and define an organization’s competitiveness and ability to change the entire landscape of the industries in which it participates.