A new era of business productivity has arrived, once again riding a wave of technological innovation. This dramatic development has arrived seemingly unnoticed, yet is often the first and last application we use everyday. In my view, the 2007 Microsoft Office System (SharePoint and Office 2007) should be the first place we look to create a new business process automation solution; it is where we will often find the shortest path to improved productivity and skipping this step may cost you time and money.
I became an information technology consultant almost 20 years ago because I enjoyed solving problems for clients by providing computer based solutions to business problems. Typically, two key factors driving the success of any computer based business solution were speed of deployment and cost of the project. Speed and cost are two key components used to determine a projects value. Projects developed using the 2007 Microsoft Office System offer great value because they improve productivity significantly faster and for a fraction of the cost compared to existing information technology approaches.
How fast? At what cost? Based on my experience, for certain common project types, 25% less than custom coding or purchasing an off the shelf package for a specific business purpose. The type of solution is important. The 2007 Microsoft Office System is not the best place to calculate the Federal Government's payroll, manage all trades made at the New York Stock Exchange, or calculate the orbit of the International Space Station. The 2007 Microsoft Office system is the best place to create business process automation solutions that require managing data with forms or documents, approval workflow, reports, and secure web sites. Office 2007 and SharePoint provide all the building blocks you need to create robust business process automation systems using the new version of an application people have been using everyday for years.
The potential of a SharePoint and Office 2007 based platform is extensive and will be discussed in detail in additional posts posts on this blog, but briefly the secret to the new capabilities of the well known Office suite is SharePoint serving as the foundation that ties Office products together. I say secret because even though SharePoint leads the web-based collaboration server product market in total sales with 85 million licenses sold (Microsoft's fastest growing product ever over five years) few people have heard of SharePoint. Using SharePoint as the foundation on which you stack Office 2007 building blocks, members of a "People Ready" organization can quickly create business process automation solutions.
What type of business process automation solution is a good fit for this platform? Typically, it is a solution that starts by collecting data (that was previously unmanaged) from people using forms or Office documents; that information is put into SharePoint where the data is stored centrally and made available to anyone in the organization with appropriate security. Usually the total number of users and transaction volume is small. SharePoint provides process workflow, alert, and scheduling capabilities that let people know (usually in Outlook) that some action is required. Information in SharePoint can be viewed on reports delivered in any of the Office 2007 products like Excel, Access or Word. SharePoint web sites provide the web-based framework where information is stored and securely presented to the user. The diagram below attempts to show the many possible Office System choices that could be made when assembling a solution based on a Forms, Workflow, Reports model built on a SharePoint foundation.
My goal is to get you to consider the fact that the 2007 Microsoft Office System may offer agile and cost effective solutions to a wide range of business process automation opportunities. My advice is to determine if a new business problem is a good fit for the 2007 Office System first, before building from scratch or buying an expensive off the self solution. You might save time and money while delivering a solution using the Office applications that people use every day.