[windows2000] Fwd: The New World of Work
- From: "Jim Kenzig http://thethin.net" <jimkenz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Mark Dober <mdober@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Ron Stroup <rstroup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Kevin Cottrill <kcottrill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Greg Weller <gweller@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 17:17:32 -0700 (PDT)
In case you aren't subscribed to MS CEO news. Interesting.
Jim
Bill Gates <billgates@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:From: "Bill Gates"
<billgates@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <jimkenz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: The New World of Work
Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 10:49:48 -0700
Over the past decade, software has evolved to build bridges between
disconnected islands of information and give people powerful ways to
communicate, collaborate and access the data that's most important to them.
But the software challenges that lie ahead are less about getting access to the
information people need, and more about making sense of the information they
have -- giving them the ability to focus, prioritize and apply their expertise,
visualize and understand key data, and reduce the amount of time they spend
dealing with the complexity of an information-rich environment.
To tackle these challenges, information-worker software needs to evolve. It's
time to build on the capabilities we have today and create software that helps
information workers adapt and thrive in an ever-changing work environment.
Advances in pattern recognition, smart content, visualization and simulation,
as well as innovations in hardware, displays and wireless networks, all give us
an opportunity to re-imagine how software can help people get their jobs done.
This is an important goal not only because the technology has evolved to make
it possible, but also because the way we work is changing. Since you are a
subscriber to executive emails from Microsoft, I hope you'll find this
discussion of those changes useful.
Now more than ever, competitive advantage comes from the ability to transform
ideas into value -- through process innovation, strategic insights and
customized services. We are evolving toward a diverse yet unified global
market, with customers, partners and suppliers that work together across
cultures and continents. The global workforce is always on and always connected
-- requiring new tools to help people organize and prioritize their work and
personal lives. Business is becoming more transparent, with a greater need to
ensure accountability, security and privacy within and across organizations.
And a generation of young people who grew up with the Internet is entering the
workforce, bringing along workstyles and technologies that feel as natural to
them as pen and paper.
All of these changes are giving people new and better ways to work, but they
also bring a new set of challenges: a deluge of information, constant demands
on their attention, new skills to master and pressure to be ever more
productive.
For example, "information overload" is becoming a serious drag on productivity
-- the typical information worker in North America gets 10 times as much e-mail
as in 1997, and that number continues to increase. A recent study showed that
56 percent of workers are overwhelmed by multiple simultaneous projects and
interrupted too often; one-third say that multi-tasking and distractions are
keeping them from stepping back to process and reflect on the work they're
doing. In the United Kingdom, it's estimated that stress accounts for nearly
one-third of absenteeism and sick leave.
It's also not easy enough just to find the information people need to do their
jobs. The software innovations of the 1980s and 1990s, which revolutionized how
we create and manipulate information, have created a new set of challenges:
finding information, visualizing and understanding it, and taking action.
Industry analysts estimate that information workers spend up to 30 percent of
their working day just looking for data they need. All the time people spend
tracking down information, managing and organizing documents, and making sure
their teams have the data they need, could be much better spent on analysis,
collaboration, insight and other work that adds value.
At Microsoft, we believe that the key to helping businesses become more agile
and productive in the global economy is to empower individual workers -- giving
them tools that improve efficiency and enable them to focus on the
highest-value work. And a new generation of software is an important ingredient
in making this happen.
How We Will Work
Over the next decade, we see a tremendous opportunity to help companies of all
sizes maximize the impact of employees and workgroups, drive deeper connections
with customers and partners, enable informed and timely decision-making, and
manage and protect critical information.
The next generation of information-worker applications will build on promising
technologies -- such as machine learning, rich metadata for data and objects,
new services-based standards for collaboration, advances in computing and
display hardware, and self-administering, self-configuring applications --
transforming them into software that will truly enhance the way people work --
Improving personal productivity: One consequence of an "always-on" environment
is the challenge of prioritizing, focusing and working without interruption.
Today's software can handle some of this, but hardly at a level that matches
the judgment and awareness of a human being. That will change -- new software
will learn from the way you work, understand your needs, and help you set
priorities.
Pattern recognition and adaptive filtering: Rules and learned behavior will
soon be able to automate many routine tasks. Software will be able to make
inferences about what you're working on and deliver the information you need in
an integrated and proactive way. As software learns your working preferences,
it can flexibly manage your interruptions -- if you're working on a
high-priority memo under a tight deadline, for example, software should be able
to understand this and only allow phone calls or e-mails from, say, your
manager or a family member.
Unified communication: Integrated communication will provide a single "point of
entry" to the networked world that is consistent across applications and
devices. People should have a unified, complete view of their communication
options, whether by voice or text, real-time or offline, with ready access to
tools like speech-to-text and machine translation. You should be able to listen
to your email, or read your voicemail. Project notifications, meetings,
business applications, contacts and schedules should be accessible within a
single consistent view, whether you're at your desk, down the hall, on the road
or working at home.
Presence: We're just beginning to tap the potential of presence information to
help information and notifications flow where they're needed and better enable
ad-hoc collaboration to solve problems and get things done. Presence
information connects people and their schedules to documents and workflow,
keeping you close to the changing data and expert insight that is relevant to
what you're doing.
Team collaboration: Over the next decade, shared workspaces will become far
more robust, with richer tools to automate workflow and connect all the people,
data and resources it takes to get things done. They will capture live data and
documents in ways that will benefit teams that work across the hall or around
the globe. Meetings will be recorded with sophisticated cameras that can detect
and focus on speakers around the room. Notes taken on a whiteboard will
automatically be captured and emailed to participants, and attached to the
video of the meeting. They will also serve as lasting repositories for
institutional knowledge, so teams won't have to "reinvent the wheel" and work
with limited knowledge of the company's past experience.
Optimizing supply chains: XML and rich Web services are increasingly making it
possible for businesses to seamlessly share information and processes with
partners, and build supply chains that stretch across multiple organizations
but work as a unified whole. But there's still plenty of friction that can be
removed from the way companies work together. Employees shouldn't have to
manually match purchase orders with invoices. They shouldn't need to print and
mail bills that could easily be sent in electronic form. Expanding the reach of
Web services can help optimize and reduce the amount of unnecessary manual work
and make these supply chains vastly more efficient.
Finding the right information: A new layer of context-sensitive services will
give you flexible and intuitive ways to manage information that go beyond the
"file and folder" metaphor of today. You shouldn't have to "think like a
database" and formulate search queries to ask for the information you need.
Pattern recognition can help tag and organize information automatically, as
well as extract meaning from documents and enable them to be queried in more
natural and intuitive ways.
Spotting trends for business intelligence: Sophisticated algorithms will be
able to sort through millions of gigabytes of data to identify trends that
human analysts might miss. Software should be able to find meaningful
connections in mountains of data and present them to experts -- or even
automated processes -- that can act on them. Software can ensure that actions
which result in changes to other work processes will automatically ripple
through the system, making the entire business more agile and responsive to
information that affects the bottom line. Over time, software will "learn" what
information people use -- and what they don't -- and will adjust its behavior
accordingly.
Insights and structured workflow: Software should take a more holistic view of
workflow, providing data and metrics on specific activities to make it easier
and faster to spot inefficiencies and points of failure. Smarter workflow tools
will use pattern recognition and logic to find problems such as repeated
customer complaints or inventory problems, and route them to the right person
for resolution. This will go a long way towards reducing frustration, lost time
and errors that result from broken or inefficient processes.
A New Generation of Productivity Software
In a new world of work, where collaboration, business intelligence and
prioritizing scarce time and attention are critical factors for success, the
tools that information workers use must evolve in ways that do not add new
complexity for people who already feel the pressure of an "always-on" world and
ever-rising expectations for productivity.
We believe that the way out of this maze is through integration,
simplification, and a new breed of software applications and services that
manage complexity in the background, and extend human capabilities by
automating low-value tasks and helping people make sense of complex data.
We aim to make this happen through a next-generation productivity platform that
builds on the solid foundation of today's Microsoft Office system of programs
and services. We will enable people to create more effective professional
documents, access work information from anywhere, and better manage personal,
team and project tasks. We're investing in a secure infrastructure that makes
it easy for anyone to securely collaborate on documents and work processes.
We're offering better data visualization and analysis tools that bring out the
trends and patterns buried in mountains of data. We're making it easier for
businesses to create, track, manage and distribute content both within and
across organizational boundaries. And we're offering open XML standards and
rapid development tools so corporate developers can build and extend
applications that specifically target their needs.
Microsoft has been innovating for the information worker for more than two
decades -- and in many ways we've only just begun to scratch the surface of how
software can help people realize their full potential.
Bill Gates
You can learn more about our vision for the New World of Work at
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail.
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