Leaders and Innovators

In 1959, when Peter Drucker looked at the emerging information age and coined the term “knowledge worker”, he saw a revolutionary transition from an industrial society to an office-based society. Today’s information society has evolved beyond the office and jobs of all types – from call center representatives to field service people to factory workers – depend on information and technology. Knowledge work is giving way to the more inclusive term, information work – the act of creating, using, or sharing information as part of a business process.

Although business information is vital to their activities, the vast majority of these workers perform repeatable tasks dictated by defined processes - supported by information or decisions made or provided by others. We call these workers “Transactors”. The bulk of technology investments in the enterprise – such as ERP, CRM, SCM, and Plant Floor systems – have been made to automate these tasks and/or improve the productivity of transactor workers. Many recent investments in technology have been directed toward supporting the outsourcing of those tasks and processes that cannot be automated.

In today’s global, information economy, the information workers that matter most in an organization are the Leaders and Innovators - the people who move the organization forward – creating value by developing and strengthening profitable customer relationships, creating and marketing innovative products and services, improving operations and finances, and building high-value connections with partners and suppliers. These information workers take part in multiple, unstructured, dynamic work activities and processes that are driven not by transactions but by the needs of the business.

Information Worker Solutions

The complex needs of Information Workers require more comprehensive upfront planning and analysis in developing solutions. A complete Information Solution will provide capabilities to support requirements in three key areas – the ABC’s of Information Worker Solution Development.

Access – Connecting People with Enterprise Resources.

Business Intelligence – Providing People with Usable, Actionable Information.

Collaboration - Supporting business process, improved productivity and enabling interaction between leaders, employees, customers and partners.

Solutions need to be built upon a stable, secure infrastructure enabling people access to information, applications, and services wherever business takes them. Information and data need to be organized and presented to people in an appropriate format and detail and in the context of the work activities they are engaged in. Solutions need to be designed in order to support – not dictate – business process and improve the ways that people work as individuals and teams within and outside the traditional boundaries of the enterprise.

The Microsoft Information Worker Infrastructure

Traditional information technology was developed to support transactor workers and transactional business by providing direct connections to siloed applications providing specific services and information. This infrastructure was not designed to support the complex needs of Leaders and Innovators. While in the physical confines of the enterprise, they need robust access to multiple line-of-business applications, web resources, and document stores from their office desktops, as well as other’s offices, conference rooms - even the cafeteria. They are more often away from the office – working from home, hotels, and at customer and partner facilities. They have to work on planes, trains, and automobiles, in restaurants, cafes and waiting rooms. Their business intelligence needs are equally complex. They need structured and unstructured data from multiple reporting systems, applications, web sites, and documents – as well as information from other people’s desktops, applications, documents, or in their heads. Information is as likely as not to reside within the enterprise. Collaboration for these information workers is dynamic, unstructured, unlimited and business-driven by people, problems, ideas, customers, partners, or issues.

The constraints of the traditional infrastructure is a source of frustration for both the information workers whose performance is limited by their ability to access, use, and share information in meeting goals and objectives and for the IT organizations who want to provide the information and services that will enable their people to be successful.

The Microsoft Information Worker Infrastructure, based on the Office System and SharePoint technology, provides a single point of access for employees, customers and partners to get the information and services they need to support the innovation process and an integrated way for IT organizations to provide these services and manage these systems. Rather then deploying new applications providing various capabilities and supporting different business processes, the Information Worker Infrastructure allows organizations to provide common capabilities addressing multiple processes through a standard interface and tools that Information Workers already use – the Microsoft Office Suite.