Making Microsoft Office fit the new world
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It may be one of the most widely used business applications suites around, but Microsoft Office is not the easiest beast to use. ICS Solutions reckons it has a way round that by focusing on function, not toying with the tech.
The media obviously loves the `new’, the shiny trinkets and gizmos of all hues and colours, yet when it comes to businesses doing real business, it is the old and trusted that is usually the winner. That is only replaced when something else so supremely superior, or perhaps gob-smacking cheaper comes along.
That is certainly the case with Microsoft Office, which remains the dominant toolset for the majority of businesses, despite its many issues, quirks and downright odd idiosyncrasies. And Microsoft has managed to do just enough to keep its role current, despite the arrival of the cloud and the growing potential for business services based on API-linked collaborative applications.
It still has one weakness, however: it is still very much a 'technology-based’ rather than a `function-based’ solution to business problems, and it still requires, except for the most simple of set up tasks, people with reasonable levels of technical skill – and skill in those idiosyncrasies in particular. That is one area where Office runs counter to a growing trend: one that could yet prove to be its undoing despite the potential that the combination of the cloud and Windows 10 holds out.
The 5th Cavalry may, however, be charging over the ridge to its rescue, in the form of UK-based Microsoft Gold Partner, ICS Solutions, its FLEX automated applications configuration solution, which was introduced towards the back end of last year, and its latest addition, an Apps Store through which to access the results of FLEX.
Going for function not technology
In essence, the company can now offer Office users the chance to build functional blocks - applications pre-configured to provide the functionality their staff needs to perform their jobs, coupled with the ability to self-provision their needs via an internal App Store.
According to ICS Managing Director, Martin Neale, the need for them to be concerned about the technology is removed, and for the IT staff the need to hand-provision every user is removed, freeing up time for developing more functional blocks:
That’s really where the second major piece comes into play. The app store user experience just feeds into user adoption. One of the challenges that we all face is proliferation of choice, and when Office 365 gets deployed into an organisation there is a whole raft of new choices and options that are made available for people.
Our App store gives people a single place to go and it works in a way people are already familiar with, so we have a substantial reduction in the typical challenges of adoption because we are already doing something that people intrinsically understand. It’s working in a way that is familiar to them.What we have is the ability to pre-load app stores with lots of familiar functionality, substantially reducing the burden of user adoption, training, and some programs of work that accompany it.
The development of FLEX has grown out of the company’s old world professional services business, where it would put teams of people into customer premises and spend lots of time lots of time thinking about, then implementing, solutions to business process problems. Now, Neale sees ICS as an organisation which is using its our own automation tools to achieve better productivity for customers more quickly, and at a lower price point than would have previously been possible.
The app store model is starting out with a base library of 40 odd common functional apps. This is provided to users so that they can essentially extend it, change function names so they are appropriate to their own staff, and modify some of the functions without having to dig into more technical detail. The simplest app is just an end user added link, while the most complex ones the company is working on at the moment encompass entire, complex business processes.
The key goal here is to get customers self-sufficient in modifying and creating new apps for the store. And that ranges across the board; simple apps can even be created by the end users, while more complex ones will be the remit of the IT pros that have been through at least the basic two-day training course. Neale says:
What’s key to that, is that we are able to provide very simple to use tools for the end user that actually have all of the organisational governance and security built into it. There is no chance that the user can do something that would break compliance rules and so on. How far each organisation goes in governing that, is basically up to them.
Basically, this allows the customer’s IT department to pre-define and pre-configure the policies under which data is stored, where it stored, how it is stored, what applications are used to process it and the manner in which those processes operate, and all the rest of it.
That then just resides somewhere, either in the cloud, or wherever the customer themselves is running and storing that data. Then when a user needs to use a process function they simply click on the appropriate button and do it. The data is then processed and securely stored according to the type of policy, what level of security is required, and whether encryption is to be used.
That is core, underlying technology, and the customer IT department has the capabilities and tools to be able to configure the policies for governance and storage over the top. Company staff just load what they need and get on with work.
Exploiting Windows 10
The other useful factor is that FLEX and the App Store will work with Windows 10 on Office 365, meaning that one App Store application, one function, works on anything and everything from very large server, down to a smart phone. Neale says:
The main difference between our App Store and a commercial mobile app store is that apps are all HTML because a lot of these processes that manifest themselves as apps might only be there for a day. So the overheads associated with creating and supporting multiple devices would make it uneconomic. So we have a very cost effective way of populating and serving up content across a wide device spectrum. All you need to have is a browser.
Neale sees a large market potential for these developments, even just in the UK. For example, according to Microsoft there are around 5,000,000 Office 365 licences installed in the UK. So far, the company has installed some 40,000 seats, so there is still a big market to pitch at. He explains:
The desire for productivity improvement is rife at the moment in the press and the national press has everyone thinking about how they can improve UK productivity, and sat there are 5,000,000 licences designed to do just that, being consumed at varying rates.
We are only selling the UK currently. We want to scale this up, we want to be a UK business done good, as it were. The goal was to get out to the market place, show some success with what we’ve done, and then start scaling up through partners, which is kind of where we are at now.
The final bit of it, the peak of his mountain, as it were, is really quantifying the productivity improvements that he sees as being attainable. The company is currently doing some work around that at the moment. One issue here is that it involves some serious 'ground up’ thinking, argues Neale:
We’ve got something really interesting, unusual in terms of the general language that you hear around productivity, and something of a reversal from the traditional approach, certainly around Share Point. This is, essentially, to look at the business processes, what people do in the real world, in a business and what we spend our lives doing.
What most people end up doing, in fact, are process fragments because people haven’t automated them and chained them together. This leaves the end user responsible for each of the components of that process. If we automate and make simpler the fragments from the get go, there is a big productivity benefit to be had quite easily, given so much of the underlying technology to do this has already been bought.
My take:
One of my favourite words is `decerebralisation’ – take the thinking and analysis out of whether something is a good idea or not……..or `just make it a no brainer’. This does seem to fall into that category, especially for the millions of Microsoft Office users not just in the UK but around the world.