style="font-size:15px;"> Most vendors will present you with their product's unique selling points and will certainly promise you that their software not only “can do the job” but eventually will offer you functionalities that will transform your business operations holistically. Without a doubt this could potentially add more value to a business that suffers from bureaucracy or poor business flows, but more functionalities should not be considered a primary selection criterion when these functionalities add nothing but cost to the project budget. Microsoft is one of the technological leaders in this field and is clearly one of the market makers, continuously developing new capabilities to enable digital transformation across an organization’s key business process. The public product roadmap provides information about what will be made available in the next wave of product updates.
At the end of 2016 the new Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications—a range of flexible applications adaptable to meet the needs of all types of industries, offering tools to transform their finance and operations, supply chain management, sales, customer service, commerce and marketing, and communication processes—was introduced. Microsoft also provides a low-code, non-code application development platform through the Microsoft Power Platform, including the market-leading tools for data analysis using Power BI, as well as a very extensive set of security, integration, artificial intelligence, data storage, processing services, and process orchestration, built on the Microsoft Azure platform. In particular, Microsoft releases two new functionality releases per year to Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform. Each release includes hundreds of new features, and this information is published in advance so that customers can properly prepare to adopt them.
We can highlight many great strengths within the Microsoft platform, like integrating with Cloud, integration with data, Power Apps, Power BI reporting, Finance & Operation, Supply Chain Management sized for large organizations, and Business Central for medium organizations, which make it an extremely attractive platform to support the digital transformation. The first is related to the completeness and integration of services and products. Virtually any requirement or problem that needs to be solved is already available within the stack of Microsoft products and services. A relevant aspect to adopting technology is that the products are natively integrated. A clear example of this is the integration between business applications and artificial intelligence. Microsoft has developed a series of services and functionalities using artificial intelligence technologies embedded within business applications, for example, within the sales application, so that users proactively know what the next best action is to consider, thus winning the business engagement since the sales engagement process is embedded within the functionalities. The second has to do with the evolution of the platform. Microsoft's investment in innovation and development allows customers to trust that the roadmap of Microsoft products and services will be able to meet business requirements and needs that are not yet known or clear today. Technology changes so fast that a system that was implemented two years ago, perhaps even today, is beginning to become obsolete. Microsoft services are constantly evolving and updating. For instance, all business applications undergo two annual updates, adding an average of 400 new functionalities each time, and each update can be silently adopted without disrupting the day-to-day usage.
These two characteristics of the Microsoft platform make it much simpler for a company to be able to adopt technology and transform its business model, optimize its processes, or create new products or services. From experience, a successful digital transformation strategy must include the adoption of products and services versus the adaptation of them. In addition to taking advantage of the good practices that are already included in the product, adopting further technologies allows a faster implementation, and cost-effective, efficient future maintenance of the solution. However, there are scenarios in which customizing the functionalities and services provided by Microsoft have competitive advantages by differentiating the product from other competitors. Any variation or customization of the product needs to be ring-fenced, closely measured with impact assessment, and monitored by solution design and architecture authority.
The Microsoft platform also allows adapting and personalizing the services and functionalities to be able to adapt them according to the needs of the client. These adaptations allow custom developments, integrations with other platforms, and customizations of products and services. The Microsoft platform adopts technology and security standards and compliance with market regulations, which facilitates such integrations and customizations.
April Dunnam, Partner Technical Architect, Microsoft
“The need for digital transformation has never been more crucial than it is today. We are living in an unprecedented time as we frantically try to adapt to ‘the new normal.’ Businesses are faced with new and emerging financial challenges, coupled with significant software developer talent shortages. This makes it more important than ever to have agile business processes that support fast deployment and delivery of solutions.
The Power Platform can bridge this gap by providing a comprehensive low-code platform that empowers business users and professional developers alike to get more solutions into production faster. The rich analytics and reporting of Power BI, the workflow automation of Power Automate, the rapid application development of Power Apps, and the low-code chatbot capability of Power Virtual Agents provide a powerful and complete toolset that enables organizations to transform their business processes.”
Martin Draper, CIO & Change Director, Liberty London
“Digital Transformation is NEVER simply about introducing new technology without the culture transformation. Culture is necessary to ultimately deliver a new product, business model, or operating model. Simply ‘IT initiative’ thinking is doomed to fail if the culture initiatives are not working in parallel.
Since culture ‘transformations’ do not happen overnight, it is important to get the culture piece correct in the first instance. This is not a project, with a traditional delivery methodology or playbook, like waterfall. It is more about new ways of working, using new organizational structures, processes, technology, and data in innovative ways, to deliver business change in a more adaptive, flexible, and faster way.
The ability to design and deploy initiatives quickly, established from sound analysis of data, and to be able to fail or succeed fast is the ultimate goal. Organizations that embed this thinking into their culture (and investment strategy) are those that are taking digital transformation seriously. Today there are more technology options than ever to accelerate the journey, but unfortunately many organizations are still relying on a proliferation of IT projects to define a digital transformation strategy and avoiding solving the more complex and more important piece of the puzzle.”
Chai Ming Kong, Head, Technology and Digital Transformation, KFC & Pizza Hut
“Digital disruption is a question of when and not if. In many organizations, COVID-19 has acted as a catalyst to accelerate their digital transformation and rethink their strategic priorities, investments, and a new market and growth potential. With Cloud as a means of the beginning—the connected value across the ecosystem now is more powerful than ever before with the strong integration that exists across the value chain. Embrace the opportunity.”
How to Drive Business Efficiencies
Engaging your customers is more important than ever before. To engage with customers in the way they need
