I blogged over at my ‘official’ company blog about strategic considerations regarding Digital Transformation. There is a lot of messaging directed at sales, partners and CEO level conversations. For the techies, however, how does the strategy translate into a technical implementation that you can actually deliver, to facilitate Digital Transformation within the organisation? In other words, how do you make solutions that are sustainable and relevant?
Microsoft can help with modern, cloud-based tools and a cloud platform. Partners have the ability to use tools such as Office365, Power BI, Microsoft Flow and AzureML to reduce the integration cost and friction to deliver technical solutions. These partners can speak directly to the digital transformation, and lead it. These tools can form composable units or modules, which can be fitted together to meet business needs directly, thereby facilitating digital transformation.
What are these tools? During the WPC keynote, Ecolabs showed off their solution, which involved Power Bi and Microsoft Flow. Here is the example Microsoft Power BI Solution below:
Microsoft Flow is a new tool, which was used to create some of the workflows to align the productivity processes with the resulting dashboard.
What is Microsoft Flow? Well, it’s a great little app and I think you should take a look. Microsoft Flow allows you to create automated workflows between your business or consumer applications and services and connects them so that you get some action, such as notifications, synchronize files, collect data, and more actions that might be useful to your business.
Why is that useful for a Business Intelligence implementation? Well, it can help to track where your data is going. As someone who often goes into organisations where people have ‘lost’ data or it is hiding somewhere that the business people can’t get it, I see Microsoft Flow as a way forward for Digital Transformation in the business by facilitating the flow of data around the organisation.
You can even create workflows on your mobile device. Here is the Ecolabs example from WPC:
Basically, a Flow connects your web services, files, and cloud-based data to save time and effort for everyone, every day.
It’s good to see that Microsoft are a much more open organisation these days; I think that Microsoft Flow is evidence of the open attitude towards other companies, organisations and methodologies that are outside of the Microsoft corporate boundary. In particular, I am a huge fan of Wunderlist and they mentioned it yesterday during the Day One keynote. I know that Wunderlist have been bought by Microsoft and I hope that Wunderlist will appear in Office365 soon, such as in Outlook.
How does Flow work? Well, you start with a template, which gives you a great head start. Why not give it a blast? If it means you get to use Wunderlist as well for all of your lists, and start to love it, then you can thank me!
You could even use Microsoft Flow for new Github issues, and send a notification to Slack. Or perhaps you could use Flow so that you retain Dropbox as your file storage system, integrated with Office365. The examples are endless, I think.
All this shows that the cloud is a great enabler, and a platform, which partners and companies can use in order to make their organisations more productive and collaborative. These are simple examples, and I’m sure that you can think of more! The integrations all happen in the cloud, and it is one way that the cloud can be used as a tool for Digital Transformation.
Any questions, send me an email at hello@datarelish.com.
Kind Regards,
Jen Stirrup
good blog.
it is a good blog.