I stayed over in Wellington overnight so as to attend Provoke’s Fresh from the Oven business seminar this morning. Provoke is a 6-year old Microsoft Gold-partner based in Wellington, and currently has 36 staff, of which about 8 were also at the seminar. Mason and Ian tag-teamed the presentation; Mason taking the lead in presenting the slides and ideas, but calling on Ian frequently to add commentary and ask questions.

Mason, the MD of Provoke, kicked off by showing Microsoft’s “People Ready” video which included various international business people talking about the power of their people, and the use of technology to support business outcomes.

A New Work of Work
Key trends: one world of business, always on / always connected, transparent organisation, cost pressures. Role of software: simplify how people work together, find information and improve business insight, help protect and manage content, and reduce IT costs and improve security.

Technology is converging: (1) electronic storefronts, online banking, customer contact centers; (2) mobile phones, PDAs, laptops and digital lifestyle; and (3) communication, content and collaboration. Given this and the role of software ideas above, the result has too often been short-term investments along with siloed solutions for individual users and needs. This results operational challenges: security (multiple user names and passwords), manageability (complex IT architectures; 70% of the IT budget is spent on maintenance projects), interoperability (for new and old systems), and higher total cost of ownership. In addition to these operational challenges, there are also innovation challenges: agility, the effectiveness of software, change management, and business impact.

Thus IT is faced with two competing demands: (a) responding to escalating business needs, and (b) improving organisational efficiency.

Business Productivity Infrastructure (BPI)
BPI is a new concept / framework from Microsoft focused on driving productivity for the business:
(a) Unified Communications and Collaboration … voice over IP, workspaces, instant messaging, portal, telephony, and web conferencing. Key ideas: unify business communication, empower teams, connect people process and information, and work anywhere anytime.
(b) Enterprise Content Management … document management, records management, web content management, web publishing, and forms. Key ideas: managing diverse content, satisfy compliance requirements, efficiently manage multiple web sites, and reduce paper and manual processes. Drivers: content chaos (moving to decentralised authoring with centralised branding control), regulatory climate, multiple publishing channels, and process inefficiencies (eg, workflow). ECM is a big need: 80% of an organisation’s information is unstructured, and of that 90% remains unmanaged.
(c) Business Intelligence … reporting, analytics, scorecarding, data warehousing, data modelling, and data integration. Key ideas: integrating disparate business systems, easily analyse complex business information, and empower decisions at all levels. Drivers: misaligned business architecture, data chaos spreadmarts, analysis paralysis, and IT dependent scorecards and KPI dashboards.
(d) Common Services across the three above … XML file formats, web site and security framework, extensible UI, business data catalogu, workflow, and metadata
(e) Search … Enterprise search (Microsoft’s answer to Google) … Windows Live Search, Windows Vista, and MOSS 2007. Drivers: integrated search across your information infrastructure, find unstructured information, structured information and people (eg, expert location), and search and manage your search deployment. Security trimming is in the new search engine; that is, resources that people are not authorised to click through to are removed from the search resultset. Windows Search 4 (for 2H2007) is a forthcoming federated search client for Windows desktop; it will tap into multiple repositories and indexes and present a coherent resultset.

All of these things work on top of a secure, well-managed infrastructure; which won’t be discussed in this session.

Business Productivity Maturity Model
The BP maturity model is a framework to help organisations identify where they are along the BPI track. Four steps:
(1) basic = cost center … uncoordinated, manual infrastructure; knowledge not captured
(2) standardised = more efficient cost center … managed IT infrastructure with limited automation and knowledge capture
(3) rationalized = business enabler … managed and consolidated IT infrastructure with extensive automation, knowledge captured and re-used
(4) dynamic = strategic asset … fully automated management, dynamic resource usage, business linked SLAs, knowledge capture automated and use automated

There is an assessment tool available to help organisations identify where they are in the four areas (it’s an Excel spreadsheet calld the ‘Business Productivity Infrastructure Analyzer’). The outcome of the assessment tool is generally technology-agnostic. It is a very technology-aligned set of questions, asking assessing questions within the context of unified communications, ECM, and business intelligence. That is, Microsoft uses its framework and requires organizations to answer according to its framework.

Summary
The past few years have been very difficult for Provoke and other Microsoft business partners because of the dearth of technology offerings and releases from Microsoft. With the new set of releases of Microsoft in recent months, Mason sees a definite entry point into a new phase of customer engagements.

Michael’s Thoughts
Here’s some questions I leave with:
1. “70% of IT spend is on maintenance” … what should it be? What’s best practice in this area?
2. For the Business Productivity Maturity model, it would be interesting to note in what ways Microsoft has contributed to organizations being on the lower end of the maturity model, eg, due to poor technology offerings in recent years. And it would be interesting to see where Notes shops sat in comparison, due to the much longer availability of such things.
3. The session was more technology-aligned than I thought it would be, at least at the level of technology categories. There wasn’t a big push of specific products, however. I’m undecided as to whether it was a tech-driven session or not. Still much to think about.