_____
From: Bill Gates [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2006 2:23 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Beyond Business Intelligence: Delivering a Comprehensive Approach
to Enterprise Information Management
This week, more than 100 CEOs representing many of the world's leading
companies are meeting in Redmond, Washington, to discuss technology trends
that promise to reshape the corporate landscape. The occasion is the
Microsoft CEO Summit, an annual event that we've been hosting since 1997.
In the decade since that first CEO Summit, technology has transformed the
world of business in profound ways. Back then, e-mail was just emerging as a
preferred medium for business communication. E-commerce was in its infancy.
Most companies still relied on faxes and phone calls to conduct business.
Today, we communicate and collaborate instantly with colleagues, customers
and partners around the world. Global supply chains speed the flow of
products from factory floor to store shelf. Cell phones are ubiquitous.
Mobile access to e-mail is rapidly becoming the norm.
The impact on the workforce is remarkable. Productivity is higher than it's
ever been. Buyers can shop the entire world without leaving their desk.
Sellers have access to markets that were once beyond reach. The amount of
information collected about customers, competitors and markets is
unprecedented.
But there are times when it feels like all of these changes have overwhelmed
the tools we use to do our day-to-day jobs. I wanted to share my thoughts on
this important issue with you and other business decision makers and IT
professionals.
The problem, really, is twofold. The first is information overload. Faced
with the endless deluge of data that is generated every second of every day,
how can we hope to keep up? And in the struggle to keep up, how can we stay
focused on the tasks that are most important and deliver the greatest value?
The other problem is something I call information underload. We're flooded
with information, but that doesn't mean we have tools that let us use the
information effectively.
Companies pay a high price for information overload and underload. Estimates
are that information workers spend as much as 30 percent of their time
searching for information, at a cost of $18,000 each year per employee in
lost productivity. Meanwhile, the University of California, Berkeley
predicts that the volume of digital data we store will nearly double in the
next two years.
That makes solving information overload/underload a critical task.
Fortunately, a new generation of technology innovations is opening the door
to solutions that will make it dramatically easier to find relevant
information quickly; to use that information to drive intelligent
decision-making; and to instantly share the knowledge that results across
the enterprise and beyond. Resolving the information overload and underload
problem will take more than just better search tools. What's required is a
comprehensive approach to enterprise information management that spans
information creation, collection and use and helps ensure that organizations
can unlock the full value of their investments in both information and
people.
As these solutions enter the mainstream, we will expect dramatic
improvements across the key drivers of business success. Software that
streamlines how we find, use and share business information will enable us
to strengthen relationships with customers, speed innovation, improve
operations and create more flexible connections to partners and suppliers.
The End of Information Underload/Overload
To deliver on the promise of this new generation of solutions, Microsoft is
focused on creating software that addresses specific businesses priorities:
Productivity: Information fatigue is one inevitable result of information
overload. We are working to develop tools that help information workers
prioritize their work and focus on the tasks that are truly important. At
the same time, we are working to create unified communication solutions that
provide a single entry point to all of the tools we use to communicate with
coworkers and customers.
Collaboration: New meeting technologies will make distributed meetings
simple and cost effective, and provide rich tools that enable team members
to work together to create documents and plans. In addition, companies will
be able to capture all of the interaction in meetings and preserve
institutional knowledge that is often lost today.
Business intelligence: Powerful yet intuitive software that supports
advanced visualization and modeling of information will be used every day by
information workers to find meaningful patterns in the vast sea of data they
collect. This software will also help employees use the insight they gain to
trigger processes that enable organizations to respond quickly as business
conditions change.
Workflow optimization: Smarter workflow software will eliminate friction
points that hamper organizational agility. These tools will automate the
movement of approvals, alerts and exceptions. They will also have the
intelligence to recognize inefficiencies in existing processes and make
improvements.
Microsoft is also devoting particular attention to the problem of enterprise
information access. In a world where information can be stored on the
desktop, the intranet or out on the Web, and where the right people may be
located in an office halfway around the world, enabling seamless access to
enterprise information is a complex problem.
An important starting point is to move beyond the traditional search tools
that people use today to find information on the Web and elsewhere. Instead,
software needs to be tuned to better match the way information is created
and stored in the enterprise so that it is capable of searching all types of
structured and unstructured business content, from emails to information
stored in line of business applications to data stored in corporate
databases. This software needs to be built on a search engine that utilizes
algorithms and incorporates features that are designed specifically to deal
with business content so that relevance and ranking results meet the needs
of business users.
Enterprise-enabled search is just one aspect of the solution. One of the
biggest barriers to information access in the enterprise is the fact that
data is often stored in so many different repositories. This leads to
painfully inefficient processes that force information workers to leave one
application, logon to another, find a single piece of data and write it on a
piece of paper, and then return to their original application, just to
complete a simple task like sending an email to a customer. This is a
significant drag on productivity. Microsoft's goal is to deliver enterprise
information access solutions that present information workers with a single,
unified way to get at the information they need no matter where it resides
without leaving the application they are currently working in so they can
make smart decisions and take action with greater speed.
In addition, finding ways to take full advantage of the knowledge that
employees possess remains a challenge in all organizations. According to
some estimates, 80 percent of the expertise within the average organizations
is "tacit knowledge" that is undocumented and difficult to locate.
Next-generation solutions will enable information workers to tap into social
networks to find subject matter experts who can provide the support they
need to accomplish specific tasks.
Looking Ahead to the Next 10 Years
To solve the problem of enterprise information access, we've made
significant R&D investments. As a result, over the next 12 months we intend
to roll out a wide range of new technologies that will transform the way
people find, use and share information in the workplace. Products like
Windows Vista and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft
Office Outlook 2007 in the 2007 Office System will bridge the gap between
information workers and the information they need to be more effective.
Another new technology aimed at streamlining information access that should
be available in the near future is an enhanced search tool called Knowledge
Network for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. This add-on will track
expertise and relationships in an organization so information workers can
quickly connect to people with the right skills and knowledge. We also plan
to introduce a test version of Windows Live Search, a one-stop entry point
for finding information on the desktop, the intranet and the Web.
In my first CEO Summit keynote speech in 1997, I looked ahead 10 years to a
time when bandwidth would be vastly improved, the majority of adults would
use e-mail and the Web would be integral to the way we plan trips, make
purchases and coordinate with friends. Not all of my predictions have come
true yet-I also said using speech to interface with computers would be the
norm by now. But that is coming soon.
The theme of this year's CEO Summit is "The Next 10 Years." So where will we
be 10 years from now? As I said back in 1997, there's a tendency to
overestimate how much things will change in two years and underestimate how
much change will occur over 10 years. But I think there are some things we
can say with a reasonable degree of certainty.
During the next 10 years, networks will get faster, computer processing will
continue to increase in accordance with Moore's Law, and data storage will
continue to fall in price. Meanwhile, high-definition screens will be
cheaper, lighter and more portable. Mobile phones will rival today's desktop
PCs for power and storage. Most important, the software that ties it all
together will become increasingly sophisticated in its ability to understand
the way you work, and increasingly streamlined and intuitive in the ways you
use it.
During the next 10 years, the idea of "search" will give way to a notion of
seamless access to knowledge as people begin to utilize tools that let them
interact with their computers using plain English-or plain Spanish, French,
Chinese or Russian-to instantly link to the information or people they need.
In this New World of Work, repetitive, uninteresting tasks like moving data
from one system to another will be automated and employees will focus much
more of their time and creative energy on work that generates real value and
growth.
In 1997, the theme of CEO Summit was "Corporate Transformation for Friction
Free Capitalism." Today, in a world where we have access to virtually
unlimited information at our fingertips, global supply chains, international
markets that operate 24 hours a day and communication tools that enable us
to move data around the world instantly have brought us a lot closer to a
world of friction free-capitalism than many people thought possible back
then.
As we look ahead to the next 10 years and the promise of the New World of
Work, I believe we are on the verge of an idea that is even more powerful:
the age of friction-free innovation.
Bill Gates
You can read more about our vision for enterprise information access at
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail.
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