Software joinery at work

Bill Gates calls the gap between personal productivity and business application software the "last mile" in productivity. Jyoti Banerjee has been waiting fifteen years for this bridge to be crossed.

I have learned (and continue to learn) a new way of working. Through the use of portable computing, mobile connectivity and the Internet, my working life has been transformed – and so has the organisation of the rest of my life. And I am not alone in this, because every single one of you reading this blog will have a similar story to tell.

However, the organisations we work in, with few exceptions, still work in the same way as they used to ten years ago. Business processes may have got automated along the way, but the engagement between person and process has not changed as much as the changes in personal productivity.

Although I have talked much about this for the past five years, I have felt this was largely a lonely crusade. Frankly, nobody seemed to care much about the gap between person and process.

This week my crusade acquired a very big gun. Bill Gates, no less, speaking at the Convergence 2006 event in Munich, trained his rather punchier firepower on what he calls the “last mile of productivity,” which he describes as the gap between personal productivity software and back-end business systems. Gates’ phraseology may be borrowed from telecoms, and his ambition is certainly shared with every other vendor that has used an Excel link as a fig leaf to paper over the disconnect between personal productivity software and the software that runs the enterprise.

What is different about Gates’ solution is the breadth of vision employed in bridging this productivity gap. Of course, we are talking about Microsoft - whose record in translating vision into reality can be likened to a patchwork quilt that has a few squares missing - so we need to be careful about assessing when the vision translates into reality. More about timelines later.

The lesson of the home electric motor
To help you, gentle reader, grasp the significance of the last mile story for me, here is a lens that will help you see more clearly. About fifteen years ago, I came across Don Norman during a consulting gig for Apple. At the time, Norman was Apple Fellow responsible for how humans interface with computers. While everybody was wondering how to make their 386s do for five seconds what a Mac could do in its sleep, Norman was wondering about the shape of computing five years on, ten years, twenty five years and even fifty years on.

Norman’s assessment, which he wrote about in a highly readable book, Things that make us smart, was that computing would follow the same trajectory as the home electric motor. When Sears introduced the home electric motor at the dawn of the twentieth century, the product did everything from mixing cakes to doing the laundry. It had a whole bunch of attachments that attached to the core electric motor that enabled a multitude of household tasks to be accomplished. In sales terms, it was an awesome hit.

Today, you will not find a single advertisement for a home electric motor. Why? Because the home electric motor exists in the appliances that we use. We don’t take our activities to the home electric motor – instead, each appliance we use now has its own motor.

In computing terms, I have been waiting for the day when we stop going to the software and the software comes to us instead. Gates’ last mile vision is the first uncompromising step in getting the software to where we are. Let me explain how in three ways.

One, in combining personal productivity (Office 2007), desktop infrastructure (Windows Vista) and ERP/CRM business applications (Microsoft Dynamics) into a single visual and functional grammar, the user is able to take advantage of business software without the complex, proprietary, training-intensive interactions of current and previous examples of business software. I remain unconvinced about the individual worth of Vista and Office 2007, compared to their predecessors. But combine them with Dynamics and the result is much, much stronger.

The user gets role-specific business information delivered to the desktop without needing to access the business applications that create and store that information. Further, the user can interact with and act on that information inside their personal applications, and still engage with integrity with the business processes that are captured in the line-of-business applications. In practice, this means that the sidebar in Vista can be populated with real-time data from the CRM system – the user can interact with the CRM data inside their Office system, without needing to login to the CRM application.

Secondly, the deep integration between Office and Dynamics is extended by online services. Dynamics CRM is already available as a hosted product via Microsoft’s partners. Now Dynamics ERP has been added to the mix. Next year both products will be available as hosted products direct from Microsoft. Interestingly, as the code base is identical to the one used “on-premise,” it should be possible for medium enterprise with multiple locations to mix and match in-house products with hosted services.

(Personal aside cum plea to Microsoft: on-premise is a nothing word – it means zip. At least, not in Europe. Please do not compound the dismembering of the English language by semi-literate geeks by using premise when you mean premises – they sound similar but they mean completely different things.)

Finally, the Dynamics offering is enriched by online services that bring new internet capabilities to users of business applications. For example, Dynamics CRM customers can integrate keyword marketing with Microsoft adCenter into their online marketing campaigns. And Dynamics AX customers can use eBay as an online sales channel, allowing placement of stock items on the auction channel, as well as downloading financial details for sold items.

Visibility
How much of this exists today? That is much harder to answer. We will have a better idea when Windows Vista and Office 2007 release later this month. The last mile of productivity will be bridged more effectively when we can see next year's hosted versions of the CRM and ERP applications, as well as what Microsoft calls Dynamics snaps: mash-ups that combine Dynamics information with Office 2007 and Windows Live internet services.

The technologies discussed here are not exclusive to Microsoft. Others who expose web services APIs in this business applications should also be able to integrate with the desktop and online services. Ultimately, for the user, the most authoritative bridging of the last mile will come when their need for awareness of the business applications that work in the background will slip away to near-zero. This is not a pipedream, as vendors can already start building custom or vertical applications that exploit the deep integration between Vista, Office and Dynamics. The user can concentrate on the custom software and not worry about visibility of the ERP or CRM suites.

End-note: I might still have to go to my business applications to carry out activities. But I can see the day coming when the information in those biz apps will come to me. It may not happen anytime soon, but I think I can smell it in the air. The software equivalent of the home electric motor is coming home to roost.

Comments

[Greg Krauska]

Jyoti,
The spirit of your comments are right on. While we have become more productive, we have not necessarily become more effective. Software must become more relevant to the user's "purpose" while making it easier to bring out their real talents. What would it take for software to have users say, "Wow, this software really allows me to bring out my very best to this work!"

[Jyoti Banerjee]

Hi Greg,
I completely agree with your comment about software that brings the best out of the user. The question I would ask is this: what will it take to get software authors to protect the user from the intricacies of their software? It could be that current biz apps are still too complicated to do that but I am encouraged by the new wave of Internet apps that assume no prior training on the part of the user.
As that way of thinking permeates through the ranks of the biz app authors, I live in hope that the next generation of software will allow the user to shine.
Thanks for your comment - right on the button.