Bill Gates calls the gap between personal productivity and business application software the "last mile" in productivity. In this guest blog excerpted from KiteBlue, Jyoti Banerjee assesses if the gap has been bridged.
The use of portable computing, mobile connectivity and the Internet has changed the way we work over the past decade. However, the organisations we work in, with few exceptions, still work in the same way as they used to ten years ago. Business processes may have got automated along the way, but the engagement between person and process has not changed as much as the changes in personal productivity.
This past week Bill Gates focused attention on what he calls the “last mile of productivity" in his keynote at the Convergence 2006 event in Munich, which he describes as the gap between personal productivity software and back-end business systems. In other words, the gap between people and process.
What is different about Gates’ solution is the breadth of vision employed in bridging this productivity gap. Of course, we are talking about Microsoft - whose record in translating vision into reality can be likened to a patchwork quilt that has a few squares missing - so we need to be careful about assessing when the vision translates into reality. More about timelines later.
Bridging the gap
In computing terms, I have been waiting for the day when we stop going to the software and the software comes to us instead. Gates’ last mile vision is the first step in getting the software to where we are. Let me explain how in three ways.
One, in combining personal productivity (Office 2007), desktop infrastructure (Windows Vista) and ERP/CRM business applications (Microsoft Dynamics) into a single visual and functional grammar, the user is able to take advantage of business software without the complex, proprietary, training-intensive interactions of current and previous examples of business software. I remain unconvinced about the individual worth of Vista and Office 2007, compared to their predecessors. But combine them with Dynamics and the result is much, much stronger.
The user gets role-specific business information delivered to the desktop without needing to access the business applications that create and store that information. Further, the user can interact with and act on that information inside their personal applications, and still engage with integrity with the business processes that are captured in the line-of-business applications. In practice, this means that the sidebar in Vista can be populated with, say, real-time data from the CRM system – the user can interact with the CRM data inside their Office system, without needing to login to the CRM application.
Secondly, the deep integration between Office and Dynamics is extended by online services. Dynamics CRM is already available as a hosted product via Microsoft’s partners. Now Dynamics ERP has been added to the mix. Next year both products will be available as hosted products direct from Microsoft. Interestingly, as the code base is identical to the one used “on-premise,” it should be possible for medium enterprise with multiple locations to mix and match in-house products with hosted services.
(Personal aside cum plea to Microsoft: on-premise is a nothing word – it means zip. At least, not in Europe. Please do not compound the dismembering of the English language by semi-literate geeks by using premise when you mean premises – they sound similar but they mean completely different things.)
Finally, the Dynamics offering is enriched by online services that bring new internet capabilities to users of business applications. For example, Dynamics CRM customers can integrate keyword marketing with Microsoft adCenter into their online marketing campaigns. And Dynamics AX customers can use eBay as an online sales channel, allowing placement of stock items on the auction channel, as well as downloading financial details for sold items.
Visibility
How much of this exists today? That is much harder to answer. We will have a better idea when Windows Vista and Office 2007 release later this month. The last mile of productivity will be bridged more effectively when we can see next year's hosted versions of the CRM and ERP applications, as well as what Microsoft calls Dynamics snaps: mash-ups that combine Dynamics information with Office 2007 and Windows Live internet services.
The technologies discussed here are not exclusive to Microsoft. Others who expose web services APIs in their business applications should also be able to integrate with the desktop and online services. Ultimately, for the user, the most authoritative bridging of the last mile will come when their need for awareness of the business applications that work in the background will slip away to near-zero. This is not a pipedream, as vendors can already start building custom or vertical applications that exploit the deep integration between Vista, Office and Dynamics. The user can concentrate on the custom software and not worry about visibility of the ERP or CRM suites.
