Our tech event partner, Louis Welcomme, Product Director of Pump, a recruitment app built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and connected to Microsoft 365 has shared some thoughts on why tech intensity and an agile mindset is the difference between a great recruitment business and a mediocre one.
Recently, at Microsoft Ignite, CEO Satya Nadella spoke about the how the Covid pandemic has accelerated existing technology trends – from the move to the cloud, to the adoption of AI and ‘remote everything.’ Although no business is 100% resilient, he states, those businesses that are fortified by digital technology are more capable to responding rapidly to change when faced with changes in the marketplace, changes in their business priorities or simply changes in technological innovation. Businesses that have adopted this level of ‘Tech Intensity’, as Microsoft calls it, are able to:
- Empower their employees
- Engage customers intelligently and virtually
- Transform products and create new business models
- Optimise operations
Stephen Denning, author of Radical Management, outlines cultural and structural changes that he believes are also necessary for the future success of 21st century businesses. He argues that the 20th century system of hierarchical management is fundamentally flawed – the root cause of the challenges in the marketplace coming from conceiving of work as a system of things that can be manipulated to produce goods and services. He states, “In the 21st century businesses now must go beyond the relatively simple task of producing goods and services and set its sights on the complex goal of delighting clients” – this a radically more difficult challenge. Delighting clients can only be approached by increasingly close approximations and is never fully assured – it requires continuous innovation.
Denning outlines several long-term challenges that are increasingly affecting productivity gains and ROI of businesses in the UK and the West in general that require a radical evolution of how businesses utilise technology and respond to change.
- Business requirements and technology are increasingly becoming complex and are rapidly changing. As working environments become more complex there is less agreement within organisations or between organisations on the best way of working.
- Customers and your employees do not know what they want until they experience it.
- Projects / work is not delivered on time and is often not what the customer wanted.
- Lack of transparency, accountability and understanding prevents organisations from assessing and focusing on the right priorities. Transparency must be maintained by systematic management processes.
- Operational impediments and inefficiencies are ignored and allowed to build up. Silos of work, data and processes exist in every organisation because the elimination of delays and impediments are not built into the structure of work itself.
- Low productivity and performance are systematic – not due to lack of willingness by employees but due to 20th century framework of management. Engaging the workforce is a serious productivity issue.
- There has been a shift from semiskilled to knowledge work – with the need to perform repetitive activities becoming less relevant and replaced by the need to hire employees who can identify problems and think up solutions.
- Customers (and candidates) are in control. They have access to reliable information, can do their own research, have higher expectations and less loyalty to a brand. If not delighted, then can and will go elsewhere. Steven Denning calls this the era of ‘Customer Capitalism’
Some businesses have only just embarked or are considering embarking on their digital transformation journey due to the Covid lockdown, but many others are well into this journey. There were those, for instance, who already had collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams already in place before the pandemic hit seeing productivity and efficiency gains through such a tool, whether in the office or at home. It is worth noting that Slack, that inspired MS Teams, has been used by software development businesses for years whilst other businesses continued to collaborate unproductivity with Email.
Now that we are moving into the 2020s however ‘digital transformation’ – the adoption of digital tools in the cloud for improving efficiency and increasing productivity is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity. The organisations that are now achieving the greatest successes are those applying a creative, entrepreneurial mindset to invent new digital capabilities using cloud technologies. Leading recruitment businesses are now moving beyond adopting the latest applications and are developing their own digital capabilities to delight their customers in new and innovative ways. Microsoft calls this ‘Tech Intensity.’
Microsoft’s solutions have been built for the era of Tech Intensity. One is Microsoft’s Power Platform. Sitting on the same Common Data Model as its Microsoft 365 suite of applications. The Power Platform allows businesses to customise and build low code / no code applications, easily automate workflows between systems a and build your own business intelligence reports from multiple data sources
More recently Microsoft has even turned Microsoft Teams into a low code data platform with ‘Project Oakdale.’ The new functionality enables users to easily build applications and bots directly within Teams, empowering business users to rapidly respond to changing business needs and create custom solutions. Your employees now have key business data at their fingertips to build new apps that address real business problems—all without ever leaving Teams.
The ability for businesses to purchase cheap and technically accessible, intelligent cloud applications – ‘democratised’ technology – allows employees in collaboration with their digital and IT teams to respond to changes in the marketplace, and create new opportunities, with Agility.
- Break up traditional silos to expose the technology, data, and business process workflows inside a company.
- Empower employees to become self-organising and incorporate the removal of inefficiencies into the structure of work itself through automation, retrospectives, radical transparency to focus on delivering value.
- Operate in client-driven iterations in cross functional teams, with checkpoints for review and the ability to change plans and improve quickly – continuous improvement.
- Communicate interactively with clients and between employees.
As Satya Nadella said at Microsoft Inspire, Tech Intensity creates a new operating architecture inside businesses and we need to use this opportunity, and the crisis’ that we face in the marketplace, to decide what should be rebuilt, what should be reimagined and what should be left behind.
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Find out more about how Microsoft’s cloud solutions can help your business here and connect with our article contributor on LinkedIn here.
