Microsoft: "People-Ready" Business Value

Microsoft announces its marketing strategy to business for the 2006/2007 wave of products and it all comes under the banner of “People-Ready”.

Lots of comment on it today from others: Beta News, Microsoft Watch, Clive Watson. It’s been reasonably popular on technorati too.

For some time Microsoft have been using the phrase “People-Driven Process” in the collaboration space. So what is being a “People-Ready” Business about. Well apparently it’s about:

“The company’s [Microsoft’s] People-Ready vision is based on the belief that people are the ultimate drivers of a business’ success. A business that is People-Ready gives its people software tools that enable them to collaborate and work together globally, to contact and serve customers instantly, and to streamline and reinvent processes intuitively.”

From: Microsoft Announces “People-Ready” Business Vision

And Microsoft is aiming to “apply its product portfolio and provide differentiated offerings to a much broader set of customer needs in the following categories”:

• Unified communications and collaboration. 
• Enterprise search. 
• The mobile work force.
• Business intelligence.
• Customer relationship management (CRM).
• Infrastructure.

Which seems to me to be a list of business issues that people are constantly talking about. Whether they are all relevant to every business, I doubt.

I’ve not had chance to read all of the stuff that’s out there so I’m not in a position to talk about the technology but the marketing strikes me as both interesting and puzzling.

What does the tag line of “Inside your company is a powerful force – your people. Are they ready?” actually mean. Yes, I know these people spend millions on creating these things and that they don’t always want to answer their own question, but this one strikes me as particularly obtuse. “Are they ready?” Ready for what? Ready to go home? Ready to join a competitor? Or perhaps they really mean: Ready to do their job? Ready to work smarter?

I think the problem I have is the word “Ready”, “Ready” implies “prepared and available” and “willing”; technology can help with the “prepared and available” bit but has little at all to do with the “willing” bit. Being “willing” needs a business culture the fosters a willingness to go into action. I suppose all I am saying is everything I have said before about business process, but this time I’m going further than that into business culture.

Tags: “People-Ready”,Microsoft