Almost a year ago in Copenhagen, our fearless leader Kirill Tartinov debuted the concept of the “Dynamic Business,” a blueprint for how businesses could navigate through the increasingly murky waters to not just stay afloat (a noble goal in many respects) but also thrive in uncertain times.
This year, with 12 months of unprecedented activity behind us, they keynotes at this year’s Convergence conferences are very much a V2.0 of this concept as the company and our customers and partners have made a lot of gains in the last year across all of the key components of the Dynamic business concepts.
And what are those concepts again you may be asking? Happy to help here. The key focus areas of the Dynamic Business concept are people, processes, and the ecosystem, and the keynote this morning is focusing on all three of these areas.
First people—and what a place to start. One of the great things about Dynamics ERP and Dynamics products in general is the focus on the end user. The genius of the “Everybody Gets It” campaign was connecting processes that are not very user-friendly (processing financial records for instance), with the people who are responsible for doing the work—and showing Dynamics ERP products as super user friendly is a key differentiating factor between our products and the competition.
This is really where the R&D strategy and commitment to investment across the ERP products lines is paying dividends for Microsoft Dynamics partners and customers. While last year we were demonstrating the “touch” functionality on a huge Surface machine, this year with the introduction of Windows 7, it’s now as close as your tablet PC—which is a huge win for our clients in businesses that require mobile computing on shop floors, in stores, and in face to face meetings with the customer. Just another example of how “people” are at the center of the Dynamic business concept.
Next, process. Whether it’s specific industry functionality, as was recently added to the AX product earlier this year, or integration into other products like BizTalk Server to manage your unique business processes, the core goal of ERP is fundamentally to enable faster and more automated processes that help your organization gain greater efficiencies and take share from your competition.
As part of our vision and focus on process, attendees got to see a great manufacturing video that I hope everyone attending the other three Convergence sessions is able to see as well. Our MS Labs team is awesome at tying together scenarios from everyday life and business with the vision of where our products are going, and this video is no exception. Tying together people and processes is something that is hard wired into the Microsoft R&D DNA, and this video really showcased that fact.
I’ll save the last component of the Dynamic Business—the ecosystem—for the next post—