Along the same lines, I have about six meetings every day, which take from 3 to 6 hours of my day. That means that on an average day, I can spend anywhere from five hours to eight hours attending meetings and reading emails. This is crazy; no wonder we work long hours.

The one thing to remember is that time trumps everything else mainly because you cannot acquire more time. Fortunately, we have technologies and processes to help minimize email overload and the number of meetings. The most exciting advancement in productivity relies on social collaboration. Social collaboration is one of the major boosters in employee productivity and employee morale. At Avanade, we have done a lot of work around implementing top-of-the-line social collaboration projects at major companies.

In fact, the social collaboration solutions will dramatically decrease your dependence on email and meetings in a variety of ways:

• Social collaboration allows you to locate information and expertise across your organization, as well as obtaining and sharing relevant information on the spot
• It allows you to develop a social network to brainstorm and generate new ideas and concepts, and foster creativity and enthusiasm across your team
• It captures the knowledge and best practices approach among your team and company, and make them easy to find, duplicate, and improve upon them
• Social collaboration allows you to develop best practices, skills, and capabilities across the organization to learn faster and speed up ramp times (This is the most critical aspect of social collaboration – a successful employee education program is going to be a critical asset for your company)
• Social collaboration allows you to break down communications barriers between employees, executives, and stakeholders – you will find that you can discover shared interests and needs across your teams and make them relevant to your work
• Finally, you can integrate employees and vendors directly into your business processes, value chain, and dialogue

This is a dramatic way to transform the way you work every day and it make it easier for employees to work better in teams, share information, stay connected, and get more work done without having to spend hours on email and meetings.

As a result, I’m proud to say that Avanade was recognized as one of IDG’s Computerworld 2013 Best Places to Work in IT – the third time we’ve made this list in the past 5 years. This annual list ranks the top 100 IT work environments and is compiled using a comprehensive survey that touches upon the company’s career development, training, benefits and various other offerings. We foster a culture of innovation by providing employees with multiple avenues to explore their passions.

Demonstrating a passion for technology is one of our core values. It has become an integral part of our culture, and is a critical element in our approach to building and maintaining a world-class team.  We are not content with providing basic technology services and keeping the proverbial lights on, though that will always be a part of the job of IT. Our culture within Avanade demands that we imagine and deliver solutions which work for our employees and also serve as a showcase to demonstrate to our customers what is possible.  For our employees, this means leading the way in the use of Microsoft enterprise technologies.  It’s a challenging environment, but one that motivates our passionate technologists.

We encourage our IT staff’s curiosity and drive to learn by offering a robust curriculum of in-class, online and hands-on training, as well as compensation for all professional technical certifications and expert designations. Not only do we give our employees the tools they need to succeed, we also allow them the flexibility in the workplace to work how and where they choose – even providing an extended benefit that allows employees to purchase the latest gadgets.

Check out the full list of winners on this year’s Best Places to Work in IT. Congratulations to all of the recognized organizations!

Some of the attendees at La Nuvola Rosa in Italy

The following is a guest blog post by Vikki Leach, Director of Diversity & Inclusion at Avanade.

I’ve just come back from La Nuvola Rosa (The Pink Cloud), a conference in Italy serving women in technology and female students who are taking Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) courses. The event was hosted by Microsoft and the UN and was attended by a number of supporting partners, including Avanade.  I was really proud to have been asked to speak, along with a number of inspirational women who discussed a number of different topics, which included a neuron-surgeon talking about the differences between men and women’s brains and a 76 year-old engineer who worked on all the shuttles that went into space, and is still working today!

These are truly inspirational women with amazing stories. One of the most important takeaways was the crucial role that technology can play in equalizing the field and narrowing the gap between men and women.

At Avanade, we believe there is a direct connection between a company’s diversity and its success – and this is also supported by a McKinsey survey, where 72 per cent of respondents confirmed this thinking. Technology is traditionally a male-dominated field so the first step is, therefore, to eliminate existing barriers, especially at the cultural level.

Motivating women and girls to pursue university scientific studies is crucial and we believe that aspiring to professional careers in the technology sector can create a society in which men and women are equally present at all levels within institutions and companies. Organizations can play a part in this by continuing to attract and develop women and supporting them to continue growing professionally while also balancing home and work life

Having inspirational women in leadership positions helps girls and instills confidence to aspire to become leaders themselves. This was the main message I wanted to get across in my talk, but I’ll share some of the other advice I discussed during the event as well:

Women are change enablers: Companies now recognise that with more women in decision-making roles, there is a 34% higher return on investment. Women can influence technology innovation and show the next generation how to flourish in this sector. This is a huge opportunity to make a difference by bringing in new perspectives.

Women play a critical role in helping organisations evolve their thinking: Global companies know they need to move from traditional thinking to 21st century thinking, to find and keep talent. Women can provide new views and perspectives.

The global work force is changing:

• From providing a job for life to giving employees access to continuously changing responsibilities
• From being onsite to working from anywhere
• From local to global
• From  in-person meetings to virtual meeting using technology
• From traditional thinking to global thinking
• From do what I say to everyone has a say

Technology is a huge opportunity: At the moment, women are under-represented as both consumers and creators of technology. Avanade is one company that is actively recruiting women but there are many others.

As companies begin to redesign work to incorporate consumer technologies into the workplace technology makes it easier for leaders to encourage diversity in the workplace, which is a great opportunity for women. Technology is catalysing an increasingly greater capacity to offer flexible working initiatives, which helps both men and women achieve greater balance in their personal and professional lives. For companies, the benefit is happier, more productive employees.

What Kind of Data Does IT Need in a Desktop Transformation?

The most obvious data comes from PC lifecycle management tools (PCLM). PCLM tools install agents on client computers and collect information about the client hardware and software. This is usually where IT gets their data-centric view of the end user universe. PCLM tools have matured over the years to add more management features and functions, but the core data collection components have largely remained the same. In addition to understanding computers, we also need to gather organizational, business, and logistical data. Organizational data includes information about end users, departments, reporting relationships, and VIPs. Business data includes black out and change freeze dates, decision making levels, and future requirements. Logistical data includes information about locations, and deployment infrastructure. PCLM tools don’t usually maintain these additional data types.

How is the Data Collected?

To be useful, the data needs to go through a multi-step process, all of which is integrated into the desktop transformation program. This can be summarized as a 3-step process.

1. Cleanse the data – typically this focuses on application data as it is the most complex. This process includes creating publisher, software, and version hierarchies, with the addition of metadata to better make decisions, e.g. is the app known to be compatible or not.
2. Create relationships and organize the data – all of the entities and data sources need to be integrated to create a full picture of the environment. For instance, while we may know a user’s account information, we will need to connect to other systems to truly understand who this person is. This becomes important later in the project as we tend to schedule people, but deploy computers.
3. Create future state view – using business rules this step modifies the current state information to create the future state view. An example would be that for a logical grouping of users all instances of an application would be replaced with a particular version.

In a future article I’ll talk more about how data is used to create an accurate deployment plan, but first I’ll highlight what happens without this data.
Where Do Organizations Typically Go Wrong?
Many IT organizations collect data directly from the PCLM tool and start manipulating it in a spreadsheet. This is used to create a raw software inventory list, from which a future state view is created. Once PCLM data is exported, it is immediately stale. In a spreadsheet it also lacks business context because it will show raw software counts, not who is using the software. Because we’ve abstracted who is using the software, IT doesn’t know who to ask about future requirements. Organizations will then package a minimal number of future state applications, only to discover the business has more diverse needs when deployments start. Now budgets and expectations have been set, and deployments will stall because the business loses faith in IT.

Leveraging data isn’t as easy as it sounds. Before building in-house tools to address desktop transformation data requirements, you may want to look for a partner that has done it already. Here at Avanade we have developed a proprietary data-driven process that snaps into our delivery methodology. Our asset, Accelerate, brings together the people, process, and tools necessary to create and manage the data dependency on successful deployments.

Avanade's Approach to Desktop Transformation: Prescriptive, Hosted, Repeatable and with Proven Value

Here are my 5 tips for customers that want to transform business and my recommendations on how to do it.

1) Immediacy: One thing that smartphones, tablets and mobile devices are driving is the ability for users to engagewhenever and wherever they are. Mary Meeker’s 2013 Internet Trends Report reinforces the continued growth of mobile technology, tablets, digital and social interaction. Thinking about your processes as your customers sit on trains or buses in the morning, socializing during those in-between moments throughout the day, and in front of the couch in the evening makes you realize that you need both consistency of experience across devices and platforms, and a process that is going to be responsive to your users’ needs. Consider how you are designing and delivering your experience across platforms and how you can make your process responses more immediate for your users so they aren’t left waiting or worse yet, switching to a competitor’s offering.

2) Customer intimacy: With greater technology tools arising from social collaboration, big data and digital marketing, enterprises want a detailed view of their customers and the experience they have with their brand.  Nothing is better than road testing the user experience by walking a mile in their shoes. Try interacting with your digital presence or processes as if you were using it for the first time – or better yet, get someone from your target demographic to step through it cold and see what worked, what didn’t, and how intimate or personalized the experience was for them. Be a “mystery shopper” in your own business – you’ll be surprised at what you learn!

3) Agility: One customer commented that they were eager to get started but felt that “it’s hard to turn the ship.” It can be overwhelming to embark on a significant change program within an enterprise. My tip: start small. Pick one high impact user group, process or pilot site and start the innovation there, tune the approach, then roll it out progressively. Don’t wait 18 months for a “big bang” release that is completely out of date by the time it is launched.

4) Efficiency:  With continued cost pressures, streamlining processes bring faster results for all participants, including employees and customers. Seek out and learn from the smart rule breakers, intrapreneurs, or innovators within your ecosystem who have found a workaround from your standard process to deliver a better outcome. Then find out why and how they did it. By collaborating with those who are pushing the barriers of the process, you may be able to make a disruptive leapfrog in your business efficiency. Remember, one size doesn’t always have to fit all – consider how you can make your processes more predictive and flexible based on the needs of the user.

5) Innovation: It’s all too easy to fall into the tried and true paths of what can and can’t be done in the business so don’t be limited by what is truly possible. As I mentioned in my prior blog post about simplicity, opening your ecosystem to greater collaboration can be extremely beneficial. Exposing your leaders to a variety of ideas from an innovation showcase may trigger an adjacent or related idea that may spark new paths of creativity. Encourage the leaders in your business to seek out ideas and technology innovation in unrelated fields and other creative forums – sometimes you need ideas to leap across from other disciplines for disruptive change that can transform your business.

The conversations ranged from very strategic to very tactical depending upon where the customers were at on their transformational journey. But rest assured – everyone is on this journey, and some are moving faster than others. Don’t be left behind. Dive in!

You can connect with Peter on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

Source: Spencer Stuart

Ad Age reported that a recent survey by Spencer Stuart shows the average CMO tenure has nearly doubled since 2006.  And with good reason.  In the face of a global recession, game-changing technologies, and always connected digital consumers, companies are doubling down on their digital future.  With increased investments in digital, it’s no wonder digital maturity is on every CMO and C-level executives’ mind.

I recently contributed to a Sitecore-authored whitepaper covering Digital Maturity as it relates to technology decisions (Sitecore is a global marketing technology partner).  So I’ll share some of my insight in this two-part blog series, taking a step back and addressing what exactly digital maturity means, how leading businesses are expressing digital maturity, where to begin, technology’s role in it, and provide some practical thoughts on how can marketers can take simple steps to develop the digital competencies required to outperform their peer group in every industry.

Creating a Transformational Vision

MIT’s Center for Digital Business describes digital mature organizations as having the “vision to shape a new future, governance, and engagement to steer the course.”  Two of Avanade’s fellow Pacific Northwest neighbors, Starbucks and Nike, have exhibited mastery of developing a compelling digital future vision.  This maturity has helped their companies consider how digital can push the limits of customer value to deliver situational benefits, social benefits and holistic benefits that elevates them from the purely functional benefits marketers can get caught up in.

Starbucks’ vision sought to use digital to redefine the standard it had set of what a great café experience should be.  Supporting that vision required the company to examine and improve every aspect of the digital customer experience – situational benefits such as streamlining the ordering and payment process to save 900,000 hours of line time every year and offering up curated digital content to guests, social benefits of engaging their 37 million active social customers in digital conversations around the brand, and holistic benefits of revisiting the role of in-store wireless to bring many of these elements together for customers.

Meanwhile, Nike has established a leading digital position with its vision to be the epicenter of the athlete’s universe by transforming their shoes from objects of desire that deliver discrete functional benefits into a connected devices that tie their products directly to the holistic athletic aspirations and achievements of over 7 million customers.   As companies establish their digital vision they can take notes from digital trailblazers Starbucks and Nike’s and ask if their vision for a new future will deliver functional, situational, social, and holistic customer benefits.

Getting Support

In addition to having the vision to shape a new future, both companies have ensured the proper governance and engagement necessary to guide each company on their digital journey.  Early support from top executives helped these companies create the focus it has required to execute its vision and stand out from their industry peers.  Today both organizations have developed business groups – Starbucks Digital Ventures and Nike Digital Sport – to execute their digital vision.  Organizational understanding and alignment to the opportunity your future vision creates is a sign of digital maturity.  Avanade Chief Technology Innovation Officer, Florin Rotar’s recent blog, 6 Traits of Successful Leaders in the Digital Business, surfaces the competencies necessary to guide successful digital businesses.

In Part 2, we’ll discuss how to activate your vision, build a durable roadmap to success, and gear up for the journey.

To answer the question I thought I would look at the definitions and then similarities and differences.

According to the Wikipedia definition of Business Process Reengineering:

“Business process re-engineering (BPR) began as a private sector technique to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to dramatically improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors. A key stimulus for re-engineering has been the continuing development and deployment of sophisticated information systems and networks. Leading organizations are becoming bolder in using this technology to support innovative business processes, rather than refining current ways of doing work.”

At Avanade, we have defined Work Redesigned as:

”Work Redesigned is a vision for enterprises to get work done in new ways, and change business processes to improve agility, respond faster to market changes and delight customers.”

So at the highest level Work Redesigned and BPR have very similar goals of changing the way work is done to improve an enterprise’s performance.

I believe the difference between the two concepts is 1) timing and 2) focus on the user.

In regards to timing, business process reengineering was created in the 1990s when the focus of enterprises was to adopt systems across their corporation to streamline processes.  This was the era of large ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) systems being implemented to try to get all data and processes supported by corporate data centers.  The reengineering motto of the day was “simplify, automate and integrate.”

Fast forward to 2013 and a significant number of the enterprise’s processes have been automated. The major technology trends affecting the enterprise today are Mobile, Social, Analytics and Cloud.  These are fundamentally user-centric technologies coming substantially from the Consumerization of IT trends.

I also believe the significant difference between BPR and Work Redesigned is the focus on the user. In BPR, the user was viewed as a process that couldn’t yet be automated as is shown in the diagram below.

Typical BPR diagram that does not focus on the user, only the change in process.

As we move forward with Work Redesigned, the key focus areas within our program are Customer Centricity, Flexible Processes, Collaboration and Mobile, and of course, Engaging Experiences.  Instead of viewing the user as a stick figure, we are viewing them as the key to the success of our business change.

So while the goals of changing the way an enterprise works are the same for BPR and Work Redesigned, we need to move from reENGINEERING the system to reDESIGNING the experience so that we engage the enterprises most valuable assets, its customers and its employees.

Avanade recently announced the findings of a global research study that shows more and more organizations are adopting social collaboration tools. From an end-user perspective, we found that employees leveraging social collaboration are more productive, able to complete their work faster, and also enjoy their jobs more.

Beyond the survey numbers, social collaboration brings benefits that are best measured by the invaluable social impact of helping your employees work together in a simple, immediate, and fun way – further closing the gap between personal social networks and professional ways of working.

The implications of enterprise collaboration run deeper than knowledge sharing or quick communication. For Avanade, we believe that the whole foundation of how work is conducted is in flux, driven by a perfect storm of smartphone adoption, tablet uptake, and the prevalence of social networks.

At the center of these changes are your employees – not the technology. In fact, the end-user responses revealed that corporate initiatives, marketing-led adoption, and user-driven initiatives all ranked ahead of IT department pursuits. Simply installing new software does not fix issues with ideation or innovation, but enterprise collaboration does enable employees to find information and subject matter experts faster so that they can generate ideas collaboratively.

Implementing the right tools is important but user training and change management are just as – if not more – crucial than the technology deployment. End-users in an organization are never going to know how much more efficiently they can communicate and how much easier they can access data unless they know how to appropriately use the tools.

It is more important than ever to remember that people and technology go hand-in-hand – it really is a collaborative process. To read more about end-user perspectives, I’ve included the  full whitepaper below.

These were thoughts going through my head during a recent dinner party with a few friends when the discussion turned philosophical. Most of us are parents to young children and the lighthearted yet serious dinner chat was about how one’s profession helps make the world a better place for our children to grow up in.  To my left I had a medical doctor who also does allergy research.  To my right sat an architect who was working on green city planning. They had plenty of inspiring stories to tell. Now, I’m quite proud of my work, but I’ve not often thought of my work as aiding mankind. Helping a telco operator offer better customer service via big data? Yes! Supporting a government agency connect and communicate to citizens via social computing? Check! Enabling a utility company to make the work for their field force easier through a mobile solution? Absolutely! But changing the world??

I love working with disruptive technology and I asked myself, where have we used innovation and technology creativity to really make a difference in the community? Eventually, I remembered our team in France working with Paris hospitals on a solution to be used in reimaging patient care at home (pregnancy, elderly care) with a Windows 8 solution which really focuses on making the nurse/patient relationship natural and “human.” I remembered our work with a global mobile device and services manufacturer on mission-critical public safety, used for example during fires or traffic pileups, where keeping connected and having situational awareness can save lives.  I remembered our collaboration with a children’s pediatric oncology research center to fight cancer by using Azure to automate pattern recognition and early detection by improving upload, conversion, analysis, storage and access of medical images. I remembered Osakidetza using a solution for rehabilitation of chronic patients with Kinect as a key device for the interaction between doctors and patients. Technology is used to provide continual care throughout a person’s life, and potentially prevent unnecessary hospitalization, not to mention increase patient autonomy.

I don’t mean to compare the work of a business systems integrator with that of a medical doctor or a police officer, but I fundamentally believe that technology is underpinning more and more of our society and that it has the potential to make for a better society. I’m particularly excited about the transformational potential of the Internet of Things, where “things” have identities and virtual personalities operating in smart spaces using intelligent interfaces to connect and communicate within social, environmental, and user contexts. More about this in my next blog post.

You might ask, “What about the rest of the dinner conversation?” By the time I remembered my stories, the discussion had moved onto the latest Star Trek movie, which I’ve not yet had a chance to see….so I took comfort in the words of Marcus Tullius Cicero: “Silence is one of the greatest arts of conversation.”

Why are So Many Companies Struggling to Get Rid of Windows XP?

Typically, the XP elimination project, because that’s what it is about, is initiated by the IT department as a technology refresh. Goals are limited, as is executive support and budget. IT organizations know how to build an image, test and package apps, and deploy computers. They estimate the project using technical data, which lacks business context, and guesswork. Working backwards from what they think they need on deploy day an aspirational plan is created and work starts.

The Further You Go, The Harder It Gets

It might take quite a while to realize you’re heading into uncharted waters. Preparing an image, applications, and deployment infrastructure, along with supporting logistics, is going to be IT centric, so progress will be made. Status reports will be green, right up to the day they turn red. Things get complicated when IT has to engage the business. The business often has different requirements and expectations than IT, and because they weren’t engaged from the start gaps in expectations are going to be large and difficult to overcome.

From my experience I have seen many organizations make it through the first 50% of their deployments. The bad news is that this is most likely the easy 50%. Things get progressively more complicated in the back half and the projects begin to slow down dramatically or even come to a halt. Naturally, organizations prioritize those most ready to deploy first. These will be users with simple requirements such as limited numbers of well-known apps, and are from large groups that can be force fed the migration date.

It’s a Business Change Program, Not a Technology Implementation

Organizations need to ask themselves how they’re prepared to address the complexity of their remaining deployments. Diversity of apps will be high, which means each app prepared needs to be carefully chosen to unlock the largest number of ready users – this is where you need accurate data to model the benefit of doing one app before another. Scheduling and communications processes need to factor readiness, organizational priorities, and deployment constraints, to maximize the number of scheduled deployments.

In order to hit the April 8, 2014 deadline, organizations need to assess their XP elimination projects to determine how they’re going to meet the target date. Challenge any aspirational deployment plans by looking for hard data on what work needs to be done, and the amount of progress being made. You may want to look for an experienced partner to help provide the clarity to expedite the project. Here at Avanade we understand migration to a newer version of Windows is a business change program and not a technology implementation. Over the years we have helped organizations migrate over 7.5 million devices to newer versions of Windows and can help develop a business change program tailored to your specific requirements. There is still time to “beat the clock” but you need to act now.