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Hello! My name is Justin Nelson
and I am a Senior Product Manager in Microsoft IT.
Today, we are going to talk about how Microsoft IT
has embraced end user focused innovation in an agile way;
powered by underlying mega trends like services,
devices, cloud and others,
to help enable us to deliver richer experiences
in our life for service reusability.
I am here today with Pankaj Arora.
Pankaj leads the Modern IT Innovation Group
with teams both in Redmond, Washington
and in Hyderabad, India.
His team is focused on building
innovative end user experiences using agile approaches
leveraging the latest trends in IT.
Prior to that,
he led an IT initiative around cloud computing,
and wrote a book about enterprise cloud adoption.
-Welcome Pankaj! -Thanks, Justin!
Great to be here!
So Pankaj, I am curious.
We keep hearing about all of these mega trends.
Their combination and shifts in IT including to services.
We'll eventually talk examples,
but first what's your perspective on this front?
So that's a great question.
There is a lot going on in IT today
and I think there is a number of pivots you can take
and I have a personal perspective
I'll share on these big trends and shifts.
I would first bucket into two elements.
The first is a future vision
for re-imagining what IT can be,
and the second is the current IT trends
including all the mega trends you mentioned
and the shift to services.
So in my view, the whole point of the second bucket
is to get you to the future vision whatever that might be,
it's really a means to an end.
At Microsoft IT we're trying to create
better experiences and become more real-time.
The vision my team has been evangelizing
is around building great end user experiences
for the experience that rival consumer apps.
And what's more is trying to do that,
in an agile way, using scalable services
that can be reused down the road
to increase agility further,
providing an agility snowball effect for the organization,
if you will.
So these services can be commoditized
and reused with other experiences, if you like.
Creating a snowball effect for agility,
sounds great!
So I get your vision on creating better experiences
for enterprise users using consumer expectations.
So tell me what are the challenges in today's world
with this approach
and what are the key things you are focused on?
Yeah, so the challenges in today's world
is most IT shops have legacy ecosystems
with data end capabilities
that are trapped within the line of business applications,
and I think the traditional app model
is flogged in this way
and that the capabilities
are often designed for individual apps
and are trapped in that context.
So what we really need to do is build services
that open things up and allow agility through re-use.
And to do this really well,
we have to work across IT
or business silos and maximize re-use.
Now adding to those challenges,
there is this whole explosion of apps
which is part of the consumer app culture
that's working its way
into the enterprise through consumerization of IT.
So with this new phone app culture
runs the risk of creating too many apps,
a clutter that will make life harder for users.
It's kind of like creating the 1990s web portal problem
that still exists today in the enterprise
to a large degree.
There are just way too many places to go for things.
Yeah, I know an experience what you mean.
Any IT organization or user on this journey
is living in a world of legacy apps
and new app experiences,
that can be built and delivered faster,
cheaper and quicker using services.
I imagine that can lead to an app explosion
and apps for everything.
Exactly, so what we are trying to do
to realize our vision is promoting
building reusable services
and unconstrained experiences.
So a service is nothing more than a capability
or set of capabilities that can power
any number of experiences.
And an experience is an app consolidation
or it is an app or a number of apps
that can run on multiple platforms
and covers scenario ideally in a holistic fashion.
So what are some of the key takeaways to your approach?
So the first thing I would say,
is don't build out features,
build reusable services,
services that can transcend apps faster
in a deep shift service model,
that's key to agility.
The second is to build experiences
for multiple platforms, leveraging those services.
And think about what should be an individual app
versus a more holistic experience
or consolidated experience as I mentioned.
So an example of this might be an approvals application.
Do you really need several approval apps
for expense reports,
purchase orders, vacations, time cards, things like that
or could this be one unified experience
that runs on multiple platforms
leveraging the services it needs to.
Finally, the other important takeaway,
and that's embedded in the example of the approval example,
is being user-centric versus
just business group-centric.
That's one of the simple keys to building the best experience.
So don't let org charts to find the apps,
instead build apps people love to use,
apps that are intelligent
that pivot off the user's needs first and foremost
and that make their lives easier.
This makes so much sense.
So if I were to paraphrase the idea
is to think outside the app, so to speak.
Start from the user's perspective
and think about end-to-end experiences
might be approvals instead of creating
a slew of individual apps based on business silos.
And instead of building specialized app features,
build reusable services;
so to start build out that agility snowball.
You got it, and it seems simple
but most traditional IT shops are so business group
or org-centric that this rarely happens,
and when you do this you also can make use of trends
like the cloud to enable scalable services,
well, also increasing agility
through the reduced operations overhead,
you get from using things like the cloud.
Also things like user analytics, social,
location awareness, all those sort of
mega trends improve the experience further.
This sounds great, it makes a world of sense.
So if you have an idea for a re-imagined experience
using the trends discussed,
then what's a good starting point?
Yeah, sure, so there is a few important
tactile considerations that you need to get started first
including the How and the What.
So for the How we operate and we suggest others use
an agile iterative approach
versus our traditional waterfall SDLC approach.
The idea is to work fast, get feedback early and often
and to just keep iterating.
As we discussed our customer is never
just the business function it's also the end user.
So bring them in early,
bring them alongside your best designers,
build storyboards instead of lengthy requirements,
documents, I think most people don't like
to ready those long documents.
In terms of the What,
a good starting point is the first,
take a project that's low risk,
low risk scenarios, set of scenarios
and try to re-imagine it as a modern experience.
Think big and broad but start small.
Pivoting off the user, you may also need to work
across multiple business groups as we discussed
and it's not always easy.
The political challenges, at they often are,
will be greater than the technical challenges.
Getting groups aligned can be hard,
but it can be totally worth it too.
I get the challenge,
is it best to get broad buy-in first
or start to build it first?
That's a great question.
It really depends, factors like
who is funding your project can come into play,
my vote is generally quickly build a prototype
as quick as you can, take the initiative,
even if it's a strawman of the experience
and use that to help you get buy-in.
Having something tangible
can really change the conversation.
So I'm heavily biased
towards coming to the table with something in hand.
Sometimes it's best to beg forgiveness
instead of ask permission.
So what's an example of your approach and action?
So we launched this app called Campus Experience,
and we started with a theme of things people do
while on campus, and the goal was to build
a broad set of innovative productivity features.
Some of them were digitizing analogue processes,
others were unlocking capabilities
that were trapped in apps,
and others were just brand new features.
And we started by building cloud services
so this included for booking shuttles,
conference rooms,
we also included the ability to take whiteboard snaps,
obtain building information via augmented realities.
You could point your phone at a building
and learn more about it,
and we sprinkled in social capabilities
in a big of personalized intelligence as well.
By request we started to add features like
viewing café menus,
looking up acronyms and so forth.
And so, all these capabilities
have clear benefits to the user.
It used to be that you had to book a shuttle
from the lobby receptionist.
Now you can do it anywhere from the palm of your hand.
For that we essentially unlocked the capability
that existed inside an application,
expose it as a useable service
and use that to enable the scenario.
We built intelligence,
so it even pre-populates where you currently are,
using location awareness
and it even makes a prediction
of where you are going based on your calendar
and your past behavior.
This is analytics in action.
We went a step further
and we exposed the GPS service
that the shuttle team uses,
so users can now track their shuttles in real-time.
Conference room booking is another great example,
I can find a place to squat nearby
and book a room in under 30 seconds,
and so on and so forth.
So you pivoted off the end user
and built services target to them
aligned to the campus theme
instead of being confined to a single business function,
and I know you host everything on the cloud
using Windows Azure
and you make use of foundational IT services like ADFS,
for identity and exchange,
for room availability,
and of course sending those whiteboard snaps.
That's right.
So what's the device story,
and how much time did it take to build?
Yes, so we started by building the experience
for Windows phone first,
targeting movile users,
people on the go,
and we chose the phone
because everyone out here can't put their phones down.
We eventually took advantage of this platform further
by using the NFC feature in Windows phone
to create something called a Tap and Meet service.
So literally it allows employees to tap their phones together
and it will find a good time for them to meet.
You can tap your phone against multiple employees' phones,
it will find a place to meet
and even suggest a conference room for you.
In terms of timelines, the initial version
took a few college hires about a month of dev time.
It had support initially for augmented reality
shuttles in conference room booking.
The other features I mentioned
they came out in two to three week sprint cycles.
Wow! I mean that cycle time is agile.
Agile, we are.
We then brought the experience to Windows 8,
since most of our employees have a surface
or equivalent tablet PC.
We leverage all the same services,
so all we had to do is build a new front-end experience.
Again, we built it in under a month
and the developers were learning Windows 8 development
for the first time.
Since you asked about devices we also recently built
a spin-off project and brought into
our large screen 82-inch perceptive pixel displays
through a pilot in one of our building lobbies.
In this instance we used as many services as we could
to light up the lobby
and we called it Lobby Experience.
We also built a new service which took advantage
of that large display to display 3D floor plans.
So literally you can find directions to someone's office,
to a conference room, right on the display.
Again, it took less than a month for that prototype,
because we reused the services
and actually most of the time which is figuring out
how to make a 3D floor plan work.
And I've tried that, and it is really cool.
So first there was Campus Experience for the phone
and then the tablet,
and now the services they use
and additional ones
are delivering new experiences like the PPI example.
That's right, and we are also working on
another spin-off now called Candidate Experience.
Again, we are leveraging some of the same services
while building some new ones.
It's for the tablet, and I guess,
well, one thing leads to another.
It sure does.
I love the theme of targeting different devices
and also reusing services for different,
but related scenarios to build new experiences.
The idea of tailoring the capabilities to device,
the NFC for the phone
or making the best use of a large display,
makes sense too.
The factor you can do it so fast and efficient
is stellar.
So let's take a look at some of these experiences.
So let me show you
the three experiences we discussed in action
starting with Campus Experience on Windows phone.
So this is Campus Experience,
you can see the homepage right here
and with all of the core capabilities.
So if I click Transportation here,
you can see it knows where I am
and it makes a prediction of where I am going
and it's as simple
as clicking a button to book a shuttle.
And as you can see here,
it gives me the shuttle information including ETA,
shuttle number, all of that stuff in real-time.
I can also book a conference room,
you see that number in the top right here
that tells me how many rooms are available
in my close proximity,
so I click that and it's as simple as clicking again
and I have booked a room.
So we talked about augmented reality,
this feature is pretty cool.
So literally I can point my phone
at a Microsoft building and get information about it.
So I can see this one has a café,
it has conference rooms,
you can see if there are showers available,
it tells you the top three organizations
that sit in the building.
If you are hungry you can just pull up the café menu
and it will show you the nearest café
and what's available.
Play My Day is another cool feature,
so here it actually shows my day,
it can literally play it to me with audio.
It tells me if there is meeting conflicts,
it shows me meetings that have important people
above my chain and also measures my productivity health,
which right now isn't looking too good.
And if someone uses an acronym I haven't heard before,
I can quickly look it up.
Say if you are running late,
it knows what your next meeting is
and it will easily send a notification
to everyone letting them know you are late.
So another feature is the Whiteboard Snap Capability.
You can take a photo of the whiteboard,
it will enhance the image and it will pre-populate
the attendees of your meeting that you most likely
took the whiteboard photo for.
It will do one more thing which is it will send it
to the Bing OCR service
and transcribe the whiteboard into text.
Without even the app open I can even book a shuttle
just using a voice command.
Campus Experience, book me a shuttle to Building 122.
Booking a shuttle to 122.
So that's Campus Experience in Windows phone
and you can see some of the trends and services
in action that light up that experience.
So let's move over to Candidate Experience.
So Candidate Experience is a spin-off concept
from Campus Experience,
and the idea is when we have interview candidates
that come to Microsoft,
we can hand them surface tablets,
and they can use it as
sort of a digital guide for their experience
and also to learn more
and to augment the interview experience.
So the application is split into three main sections.
The first is the real-time section
which includes Alerts and Today's Schedule.
The second is Tools
which are some of the core features of the app,
and then the third is Meet the Team
to learn more about your interview team.
Alerts is all about creating a real-time connection
with a candidate.
So if there is a change in location or interview schedule
or a new as appropriate interview added,
we can let the candidate know
in real-time with their device.
Today's Schedule is all about the interview schedule
and as you can see here I can touch right here
and drill into this interview,
learn more about who I am interviewing with,
where the location is,
and even book a shuttle directly to that location.
Jumping around a bit,
so I mentioned being able to book shuttles,
again that's a capability
that we use in Campus Experience
and here we brought that same intelligence in,
so it knows where you are
and it knows where your next destination
is based on your interview schedule
and it suggests that for you.
If I have arrived for an interview,
I can click Check-In to check in to an interview.
There is a Contact Us page
which lets you contact Microsoft,
whether it's to provide feedback
about your interview experience
or talk to your interview team,
and we also have other ways to connect here.
There is a note taking section,
so I can actually use a stylus or use my finger,
take a note and it will actually transcribe it using OCR
and we planned to power it with OneNote.
If you want to learn more about an interviewer,
you can read their bio,
may be find something in common,
make a connection with them,
and you can also get linked into their LinkedIn profile.
May be you need a distraction while you are waiting;
it's not all work and no play.
We have a Fun Stuff section which includes
the By the Numbers application,
so you can learn facts about Microsoft,
including how many sandwiches Microsoft employees consume
from the café each year.
By the way Turkey Club is the most popular.
And so now moving on to Lobby Experience,
you can see here this big 82-inch perceptive pixel display
powered by many of the same services as Campus Experience.
You have got conference rooms;
you can look at a café menu, campus maps.
Transportation, and then this capability here
which lets you look at a 3D floor plan
and find offices.
If I want to find an available conference room,
I see the 3D floor plan
and can find what rooms are available.
So there you have it, three different experiences
powered by many of the same services.
Fantastic stuff!
It really hits my consumer expectation.
The productivity I get from a combined set of services
and one app experience is phenomenal.
Campus Experience has been a fantastic poster child
from bracing the mega trends of social, mobile, analytics
and cloud
and re-imagining an experience delivered by Microsoft IT.
I am loving it
and I know our employees and customers do too.
Thanks for your time, Pankaj!
Great conversation!
Thanks for having me, Justin!
If you want to hear more about
Microsoft IT's enterprise, vision and roadmap, go to
microsoft.com/enterprise/ microsoft-it.
Thank you for joining us
and we hope to see you next time!
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