Today, the pressures are different. The global workforce is shrinking as the population ages. Labour productivity is in the doldrums. And, with a more connected global population, security threats emerge and evolve faster than ever. While human ingenuity and expertise will always be needed to defend against these threats, 87% of leaders see AI as a market advantage.  

Whether you’re looking to improve agility and security in your SAP workloads, wanting to innovate without disrupting core business processes or looking for more control over your SAP migration, the cloud and AI offer a unique opportunity.

Here are five ways the Microsoft Cloud can help you harness the power of AI and extend your SAP capabilities. 

1. Create faster with AI-driven data insights

In a world of deadlines and labour-intensive tasks, innovation and creativity can suffer. By integrating Azure AI services to your SAP data, you can optimise your workflow and empower your employees to create ideas and content faster. Our AI-powered data platforms also help you complete time-consuming tasks with ease, offering instant and intelligent insights that propel your work forward. 

An example is the Microsoft Fabric platform. It delivers data analytics in a software-as-a-service model, with an open, lake-centric data architecture and deep integration with Microsoft 365. Its built-in AI Copilot helps you find out what you need to know using natural language. In addition, it’s built to work across clouds, so you can easily migrate elsewhere in the future. 

Part of the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform is Power BI, relied on by the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies. With easy-to-use AI analysis capabilities and AI-powered data summarisation, it helps you find insights, make decisions and take appropriate action with ease.  

2. Improve collaboration and productivity

To get the most from your employees, they need to be freed from siloed technology, software and business processes. You can enhance employee productivity by integrating and giving access to SAP data in Microsoft 365. 

With Microsoft 365 Copilot, your AI assistant can help you keep work organised and your employees productive. It combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data in the Microsoft Graph – your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and more – and the Microsoft 365 apps to turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet. 

Copilot for Microsoft 365 works alongside your favourite day-to-day office apps. Just a few examples:

• You can be more creative in Microsoft Word, as Copilot writes, edits, summarises and creates alongside you. Rapidly find key information or get a head start by generating (and then re-generating) a full client brief.

• Copilot helps put all the rich capabilities of Microsoft Excel at your fingertips. It will review and edit data with simple prompts, make sheet-wide updates in seconds, and visualise key insights from large data-sets. 

• In Microsoft PowerPoint, you can now quickly summarise an entire presentation deck, or organise your deck into sections. Copilot also makes it easy to transform existing written documents into full decks, complete with speaker notes and sources – all with a few simple, spoken prompts. 

• With Microsoft Outlook and Teams, Copilot lightens the load and provides the gift of clarity. Summarising long email or message threads (with bullet points and all), pulling out different opinions expressed in meetings, and quickly drafting suggested replies and action items, all in real time. So you can unlock the magic of efficient and effective meetings. ​ 

Combining Microsoft Generative AI with SAP’s SuccessFactors and Joule enables new experiences for HR leaders, recruiters, hiring managers and employees. They can now create tailored job descriptions based on SAP SuccessFactors data and external data. Or rapidly generate interview questions based on an applicant’s CV. Using Microsoft Viva Copilot, employees will be able to curate their own learning paths. 

3. Simplify with automation and innovation

When great ideas or highly productive employees are held back by repetitive or labour-intensive business processes, it can stifle progress and creativity. Simplify your business process with AI-driven development and automation, using your SAP data. 

For over a decade, we’ve been progressively unifying the Microsoft Power Platform into a unique, fully integrated and cloud-powered suite. With solutions such as Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents and AI Builder, we’ve reinvented how all makers develop software, further democratising access to innovative business solutions.

Today, all employees have access to the tools they need to create applications, solve problems, automate workflows and analyse data more effectively. With Copilot working as your AI assistant in Power Apps, the development process is more accessible and less repetitive, so your development cycles don’t get slowed down.

Just describe your goal verbally, and Power Apps will use integrated AI to generate code, and even build complete apps. Check out the latest AI and other advances built into Power Apps.

You can also auto-generate working apps and data within seconds from images and design files. Save time, build more complex solutions, and reimagine business applications. Empower anyone across the business to create apps quickly and easily. 

4. Improve developer productivity with Copilot

Working faster and smarter can be crucial when it comes to business competitiveness and innovation. One of the most exciting new capabilities we’ve recently launched with GitHub is a new service we call GitHub Copilot. It can empower developers to save time and energy with AI-generated code, and helps easily integrate AI capabilities into SAP ABAP applications. 

GitHub Copilot provides an AI-pair programmer that works with all of the popular programming languages. This dramatically accelerates developer productivity. Up to 46% of all new code written by developers using Copilot is now fully AI-generated, with developers reporting a 55% productivity boost by using Copilot. 60% to 75% of developers who use GitHub Copilot also say it helps them focus on more satisfying work and enjoy their jobs more. 

5. Stay ahead with AI-driven security

Keeping protected against cyberthreats in today’s security landscape means being able to respond quickly and effectively. With Microsoft Security Copilot, you can do just that. 

Security Copilot combines the most advanced GPT4 model from OpenAI with a Microsoft-developed, security-specific model. It’s powered by Microsoft Security’s unique expertise and scale, sifting through 65 trillion signals daily. So whether you need to detect hidden patterns, harden defences or respond to incidents in your SAP systems, it’ll help you do it better and faster. 

As the first and only generative AI security product to help defend organisations at machine speed and scale, Security Copilot helps you be more effective and efficient while also supporting your teams to solve security challenges. It runs on our security and privacy-compliant hyperscale infrastructure, which is unique to Microsoft and brings the full benefit of being on the Azure cloud platform. And over time, it will work with a growing ecosystem of products from third-party vendors. 

With this comprehensive approach, and all your security capabilities in one place, you’ll benefit from unparalleled simplicity, visibility, automation, and intelligence.  

Extend SAP and innovate on Microsoft Cloud

Redefine what’s possible by integrating AI and Microsoft into your SAP data. It can help empower your employees, accelerate savings in your business, optimise your workload and enhance your productivity.  

To learn how AI can benefit your organisation and how we’ll support you through the change, please contact the authors, Sean Pilkington and Tom Payne, or your Microsoft representatives. 

Find out more

Microsoft Discovery Day: SAP on the Microsoft Cloud

Maximize SAP Investments by Migrating to the Microsoft Cloud: On-demand webinar

Innovate on Your SAP Data with Power Platform Integration: On-demand webinar

About the authors

Sean Pilkington

As the SAP on Azure UK Lead at Microsoft, Sean draws on over 20 years of experience in SAP design and solutioning to help clients visualise how their SAP solutions can be deployed into the Azure cloud. He thrives on demonstrating innovative technology that seamlessly blends with SAP to give customers the best experience, while enabling their business to drive down costs, increase ROI on technology and accelerate their digital transformation.

Tom Payne

As the SAP on Azure Sales Lead at Microsoft, Tom brings a wealth of experience to empowering SAP customers as they embrace cloud transformation with Microsoft Azure. He is adept at simplifying complex technology applications while optimising the customer journey.

The post Embrace the art of the possible: 5 ways Microsoft AI can enhance your SAP workload  appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

More than a business agreement, the partnership between Microsoft and Sunderland is based on shared values and aspirations. We’re joining forces to positively impact the lives of local people and businesses in this vibrant city.

Microsoft’s focus on public-sector transformation has been a driving force throughout our collaboration. We know from experience that technology and digital solutions can help revolutionise public services, making them more efficient, effective, and citizen-centric.

Working hand in hand with the council, we’re leveraging Microsoft’s cutting-edge technologies and expertise to streamline administrative processes, enhance citizen engagement, and optimise resource allocation. We want to redefine what it means to deliver public services in the digital age. 

“Smart cities” collaboration: creating a connected, sustainable future 

Our mutual commitment to smart cities collaboration also sets this partnership apart. Sunderland City Council’s vision for a new kind of urban development aligns perfectly with our expertise in creating smart city solutions. We’re on a joint mission to transform Sunderland into a connected environment that offers enhanced liveability, economic growth, and environmental sustainability.

By integrating advanced technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and data analytics, we’re shaping an urban ecosystem that will optimise resource management, create intelligent infrastructure, and foster innovation. Together, we’re laying the foundation for a future that embraces digital transformation, innovation, and inclusion.

Empowering citizens with new skills

It’s important to note that our partnership goes beyond technology and infrastructure. At its core, this initiative is about empowering the people of Sunderland.

We understand the importance of digital skills in today’s world. They can provide a significant boost to personal growth, employability, social mobility, and community development. That’s why Microsoft has long supported UK digital talent with events and training opportunities, as well as initiatives such as the Microsoft Connector Community.

In Sunderland, we’re equally committed to bridging the digital divide for residents by providing technology skills training, resources, and support. Through our collaboration we’ll equip individuals with the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in the digital economy. By empowering local people, we’re not only transforming lives but also fuelling innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic resilience within the community. 

“Together, we will minimise disconnects between people, technology and place.”

Liz St Louis
Director of Smart Cities, Sunderland City Council

The journey begins

Our Memorandum of Understanding with Sunderland has set the stage for an exciting journey of collaboration and positive change.

Liz St Louis, Director of Smart Cities at Sunderland City Council, said: “Catalysed by our leading smart city achievements, I am extremely proud to be harnessing this new relationship with esteemed partners, Microsoft. 

“Together, we will minimise disconnects between people, technology and place – leaving no-one and nowhere behind.  

“Microsoft’s thought leadership, technology and digital solutions will help to revolutionise our public services, whilst empowering our people, as we continue to digitally transform our smart city.” 

Watch this space to see how technology innovation and a vision help Sunderland reimagine itself as a thriving digital hub. 

Find out more

• Visit the Microsoft for Government hub
• See our skilling and career resources
• Visit the Microsoft UK Digital Skills hub
• Read the blog: New connections – how we’re bridging the UK digital skills gap

About the author

I lead the Northern Sales Team at Microsoft, working with regional government on digital transformation and using technology and digital skills to drive economic growth and citizens’ lives.

The post Enhancing citizen-centric public services in the digital age appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Yet for many business decision-makers, the biggest question continues to be: “How do I start the journey?”

To help answer this question, I want to outline some practical applications of AI that can help your team achieve more today. I’ll then end with some high-level implementation tips.

First, a few words about preparing for the road ahead.

Nurturing (and protecting) your new “learning culture”

As your organisation implements AI, you’ll embark on a change-management journey in which departmental and data silos tend to disappear. In fact, you’ll get the best out of AI by nurturing:

• Organisation-wide participation, so all staff can contribute new solutions to business problems
• Two-way communication, right across a diverse and inclusive team
• Experimentation, including opportunities to learn from mistakes

Your new AI-driven “learning culture” will increasingly be powered by data, with richer insights and new analytical tools. To support this major shift, we’ve developed an end-to-end analytics solution, Microsoft Fabric, unveiled at Microsoft Build 2023. Infused with the Azure OpenAI Service at every layer, Fabric integrates the most advanced D&A tools – from Data Factory to Power BI and Synapse – in one place. Enabling you to surface business insights faster than ever.

Responsible AI by design

It will also be important to consider the ethical, cultural and compliance aspects of deploying AI technology. You can rest assured that, in designing AI solutions, Microsoft puts people and principle first. Our team of researchers, engineers and policy experts is guided by our AI principles and  Responsible AI Standard, along with decades of research on AI, grounding and privacy-preserving machine learning.

Our design process ensures Microsoft AI systems are scrutinised for potential harms and mitigations. We also make it clear how a system makes decisions by noting its limitations, linking to sources and prompting users to review and adjust content based on their subject-matter expertise.

5 ways to start implementing AI at work

The following scenarios highlight how Microsoft AI can help you work smarter and faster, using natural language to cut through the drudgery of search and manual compilation. Our solutions put technology, AI, data, cybersecurity and advanced usability through natural language at your disposal.

1. Transform workloads with an AI copilot

Imagine next-generation AI embedded into the Microsoft 365 apps you use at work each day – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and more. That’s Copilot in Microsoft 365.

Using Copilot in Word, you can now quickly create a first draft to edit and develop using a language prompt. Want more help? Copilot will shorten, rewrite or give feedback on it.

You’re always in control. You can (and should) review, fact-check and fine-tune content yourself.

Creating a presentation? With Copilot in PowerPoint, you can easily bring in slide content from any previous deck. And Copilot in Excel will help you rapidly analyse trends and create data visualisations.

Create reports in seconds

With our Business Chat AI tool, you can use a natural language prompt (such as “Tell the CEO how we’ve updated the campaign strategy”) to instantly create a status update, based on your relevant meetings, documents, emails and chat threads.

2. Detect cybersecurity threats faster 

For security operations and response teams, constant vigilance against threats can drain resources and exhaust individuals.

Microsoft Security Copilot reduces the burden. It uses AI to integrate insights and data from security tools, detecting vulnerabilities earlier and shutting down cyberattacks.

Microsoft Security Copilot provides intelligent guidance informed by 65 trillion daily signals.

It also puts your people first by improving usability. To understand functions, users can simply ask for step-by-step guidance.

As with all our AI solutions, Security Copilot strictly follows our AI principles and Responsible AI Standard. It also runs on Azure’s hyperscale infrastructure for a fully privacy-compliant experience.

3. Reinvent search with an AI copilot for the web  

Our new AI-powered Bing search engine and Edge browser tools are like a copilot for the web. They give you more complete search answers, a new chat experience, and the ability to generate content.

“We’ve launched Bing and Edge powered by AI copilot and chat, to help people get more from search and the web.”

Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft

With the chat experience, you can easily fine-tune your search by asking for more details and clarity. You’ll get relevant links to follow up, too.

Merging search, browser and chat opens up exciting possibilities. Need the highlights of a long annual report? Just ask for it using the Edge Sidebar. Want to compare it to a competitor and see them side-by-side in a table? Just use the chat function.

Even as AI transforms search, the privacy policies of Bing and Edge AI ensure your user identity and behaviour are safe and protected.

4. Improve services and solve problems with AI

Rapidly improve your customer service and data insights by tapping into the power of generative AI models, including GPT-4, Codex, and DALL-E 2. All are available through the Azure OpenAI Service, backed by built-in Microsoft Azure security, compliance and data privacy and the Responsible AI Standard.

Solve your business problem in seconds

Looking to speed up clinical communications or automate an accounting process? Any team member can now do it using AI and low-code. We’ve added Copilot to Microsoft Power Platform, so you can create apps, flows and bots in seconds through natural language. And whatever you build, you can easily query the data for instant, actionable insights.

You can develop Power Automate workflows in 50% less time with Copilot.

5. Unite teams, communicate and collaborate in one place

We’ve also improved usability. Instead of having to keep an eye on your chat while presenting in Teams, you can use Copilot to auto-answer any questions – and save time to collaborate.

Copilot finds Teams notifications, messages and information rapidly and helps you manage work with personalised suggestions. Asking Copilot for a summary can help reduce that Monday morning weekly-status stress by putting you one step ahead.

Implementing AI at scale: 4 practical steps

Scaling your AI journey can be confusing with so many technical, business, cultural and ethical considerations. To move smoothly from experimenting to implementing, follow these steps.  

1. Think business transformation

Approach AI as a business change programme, with tech as a key component. AI will transform your culture, so this might help you think big. It will also stop you seeing AI as belonging solely to IT. 

2. Get your people onboard

Take the time to explain to stakeholders the reasons for change. Highlight the benefits they can expect. No-one should feel they’re having AI “done to them”.   

3. Identify a problem to solve

Scope a business problem, then plan how AI can help solve it. That way, your solution can create measurable value. Don’t use a new business problem – start with one you know and understand.

4. Build an organisation-wide strategy

Create a strategy that allows AI to scale organically. Businesses that focus on scale do better than those hoping multiple, smaller projects will automatically lead to scale.

Over to you

Integrating AI into your business shouldn’t be a daunting process. We’ve designed our AI solutions to fit in with the way you work, not the other way round. This includes applying robust ethical AI principles at every step, and it’s why Copilot automatically adopts your organisation’s security, compliance, and privacy policies and processes. It also protects your tenant, group and individual data.

As Microsoft AI creates a new workplace interaction between humans and computers, I hope this blog has inspired you to take the first step. I look forward with excitement to seeing how AI helps you unleash innovation, unlock productivity and expand skills across the team.

Find out more

Visit the Microsoft AI hub

Accelerate competitive advantage with AI

Build an AI strategy with our Digital Transformation Playbook

Microsoft Responsible AI principles

About the author

As National Technology Officer, I lead Microsoft’s technology vision and model its culture of learning, while developing strategies to protect and extend Microsoft Cloud into complex regulated markets. My goal is to inspire leaders of state and enterprise, as well as regulators and customers, on how best to leverage innovation to drive digital transformation.

The post AI starter pack: 5 ways to implement AI into your business appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The way forward for getting your P&L in line is to drive revenue. However, each business is unique, and its situation depends on the company’s leadership function, ownership structure, recent financial history, CapEx and OpEx exposure, and industry-specific concerns.

While digital transformation can often be mistaken as a ‘silver bullet’, it is, in fact, the cost of doing business in today’s environment. So how should finance leaders proceed? 

Balancing cost with ROI: the three biggest challenges for CFOs 

There can be a temptation to make immediate cost savings at every turn. Yet by investing in digital transformation programmes now, astute CFOs: 

• Can deliver a rapid return on investment with efficiency savings, thanks to automation and the cloud. 

• Will future-proof their company at a time of significant technological change. 

• Will make it easier to meet sustainability targets. 

While senior leaders recognise the need for digital investment, they want returns quickly. According to the Gartner Global CFO Poll 2022, 69 percent of CFOs are looking to increase spend around digital transformation initiatives – but their expectations for returns are one to two years. Agility, flexibility, and speed have become more pressing. 

To map out where savings can be made and how best to plan ahead, we advise considering the three most pressing, intersecting challenges faced by CFOs today – and crucially, where technology can win much-needed reprieve, helping organisations ultimately achieve more with less.  

These three challenges are:  

1. Cost optimisation

2. Supply chain

3. Energy

Let’s look at each factor in turn. 

1. Cost optimisation 

Following the global economic crisis of 2007-08, the world’s economy was fuelled by cheap money. With inflation making a return, this has become more difficult to find. Supply-side costs, including scarce affordable energy, have driven up inflation as never before. According to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, the annual rate of input inflation has lurched beyond 20 percent, while input cost inflation for manufacturers leapt 24 percent compared to the same time last year (end of 2022 data).  

How to balance growth aspirations with priorities around spend

This pain may not have hit every business yet. But when companies are forced to respond to it, many will go into survival mode, and some will fail. 

CFOs are having to evaluate their areas of investment to remain competitive when consumer expectations are high, but confidence is low. They also have to prioritise incremental investments designed to deliver efficiency gains. 

Organisations, in turn, are under pressure to ensure every part of their business is working as well as it can – and the digital imperative is key to resolving this. Businesses need more innovation, agility and resilience, with less complexity and at a lower cost, quickly. Put simply, they need to do more with less. 

Making the most of existing infrastructure and technology roadmaps 

We believe organisations should look to their existing infrastructure and technology roadmaps to drive further efficiencies with the assets they already own. They can reduce operational costs by digitising based on unified platforms. 

Rolls-Royce succeeded on both counts by leveraging benefits available in its existing Microsoft stack. The company trained staff to use our low-code Power Platform – including Power Automate, Power BI and Power Apps – which has since become its most popular upskilling solution. In a few months, Rolls-Royce saw a financial benefit of about 8M across the organisation, a figure that can grow organically as more staff and teams use the platform. 

Retaining talent by digitising 

At first, the COVID-19 crisis stalled attrition rates; later, it saw employees reassess their career priorities. Many left their roles in what was sensationally termed the ‘great resignation’. As a result, the war for talent heated up.  

Retaining talent is now more pressing than ever. With employee turnover forecast to be 50 to 75 percent higher than businesses have ever experienced, they need to ensure staff are both happy and productive, with enough investment in skills to keep top talent within the organisation.  

Digital investment is the only way to meet higher staff expectations. Employees want modern technology that works effortlessly, and are increasingly expecting hybrid or remote roles as a given, with all the associated technology support. 

What the pandemic demonstrated to CFOs is that every business must strive to be a technology business, or fail. Those unable to swiftly pivot to digital were punished harshly.  

2. Supply chain

The wider supply chain is the core of most businesses and must absolutely be on every CFO’s radar – but using history to make decisions for the future no longer works. Customer demand is constantly changing, whether it’s influenced by the economic climate or making environmentally conscious purchase decisions.  

To shore up customer confidence, organisations can take advantage of intelligent automation to reduce costs, maximise operating margins and recalibrate their supply chains from ‘just-in-time’ to ‘just-in-case’. 

Take the UK company Spy Alarms, for example. By switching to Microsoft Dynamics, the service team have reduced the time it takes to book a service interview from six minutes to a few seconds. Their sales operations have also benefited from a much simpler and faster quotation process for its 45,000 customers. With the seamless integration of Power BI and Microsoft Teams, all levels of the team have access to data insights – empowering data-driven decision making with incredible precision and foresight.  

3. Energy 

Energy is a hot topic and is central to the boardroom conversations CFOs are becoming involved in. Data centres and offices are an enormous cost factor; a more cost- and energy-efficient answer is to retire data centres and invest in the cloud.  

Investing in the cloud to reduce energy consumption 

At Microsoft, our customers want to use energy management tools to reduce complexities around staffing and save costs in the near to long term. Cloud-native organisations can deliver more core value, with fully managed, end-to-end Azure cloud solutions to boost developer productivity, optimise and allocate resources, and speed up the pace of innovation. 

The East London NHS Trust has been a shining example of this. By taking advantage of Microsoft’s Intelligent Data Platform such as Azure Synapse Analytics and BI, staff can sense-check, monitor metrics and look at trends to see what’s happening on the ward. These insights are accessible from any device and even off the network, building a truly efficient integrated data system. 

Three takeaways: simplify, unify, innovate 

Every business can use technology to become more efficient and effective, whether it’s driving more value from existing platforms and assets, consolidating to reduce cost and complexity, or introducing deployments with rapid payback. 

By leveraging data and AI, businesses are armed with the data and insight on how to increase agility and growth with the assets they already have. 

At Microsoft, we’re working with our customers to define how they will survive, and even thrive, in a continually changing environment. If you’d like to understand more, visit The Microsoft Cloud – Trusted Cloud Platform. 

Find out more

Read Microsoft Azure case studies and customer stories

Announcing Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy: Enable your data to do more in the cloud

Imagining more: How organizations are reinventing operations and finding opportunity in the face of volatility

Understanding Microsoft’s digital transformation

About the author

As CFO of Microsoft UK, Mark leads the Finance Organisation supporting Clare Barclay and the UK Senior Leadership team by delivering against the strategic priorities of the company, through influencing key decisions around people, business processes and performance.

Prior to this role, Mark held the position of International CFO at Adobe and Rackspace, where he was a key part of leadership teams driving growth across all markets outside the US. With a career spread across banking, the oil industry and technology, a breadth of finance experience contributes to his dynamic, objective approach as we pursue great customer outcomes with our product portfolio.

Mark returned to the UK recently after spending time in Zurich and Amsterdam in previous roles, is a trained accountant with the ACCA, studied Economics at the University of Leeds and is married with 3 children.

The post How to future-proof your business: a CFO’s-eye view   appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Technology advancements are now accelerating faster than our ability to adapt, leaving a huge gap in digital skills. A recent Microsoft study has revealed that 82 percent of UK jobs already require digital skills, and that 69 percent of leaders feel their organisation suffers from a digital skills gap, even though 59 percent of employees believe in the importance of developing their digital skills.

The skills gap is only getting wider. By 2025, there are expected to be three million new tech jobs in the UK, and 60 percent of employers are expecting their reliance on advanced digital skills to grow in the next five years. In effect, organisations hoping to grow and remain competitive in the future need to build a workforce that is equipped to fill these roles and thrive in a digital world of work.

Yet many employees don’t have the skills they need to perform their role currently, let alone in the future.

Demand for digital skills also goes beyond the technology sector. A recent employer survey by the Learning and Work Institute found that the proportion of employers who saw basic digital skills as important for employees was particularly high in certain sectors – including media, marketing, advertising and PR (100 percent), IT and telecoms (99 percent), and finance and accounting (97 percent).

However, even in the industry with the lowest proportion – manufacturing – nearly nine in ten (87 percent) employers said that basic digital skills were important for their workers.

So, what more can businesses and employers do to ensure that we have a steady supply of tech talent joining the sector? And, importantly, how can Microsoft help?

Introducing the Microsoft Connector Community

Whilst many business leaders recognise that their organisation is facing a skills shortage, the challenge often comes in knowing what to do about it.

At Microsoft, we believe that part of the answer to tackling the UK’s digital skills gap is collaboration. Bringing together organisations from across the public and private sector to work collectively and deliver tangible benefits to the prospective careers of young people, while driving growth and innovation across the economy.

The Microsoft Connector Community, part of the Microsoft Apprenticeship Connector, is designed to bridge the digital skills gap. It nurtures a connected community of businesses and organisations that collectively leverage their brands, reputations and resources to address the need for digital skills in the workforce and connect talented individuals to opportunities.

We believe that taking a collaborative approach ensures a steady and well-equipped technology talent pipeline. This is essential to addressing the skills shortages faced by employers today, as well as mitigating future shortages.

I’d like to share my thoughts on how this could work:

1. Creating a connected talent ecosystem: When employers work together to support, empower and inspire young people, rather than bombarding them with too many competing options, we all benefit. By using the Microsoft Apprenticeship Connector to advertise digital vacancies, digital skills bootcamps and opportunities for learning and training, we can create a highly visible and inspiring platform that enables young people to find the opportunities that are right for them. In addition, by pooling vacancies across one platform, with a single access point for roles, we can recycle and share talent. We can also signpost applicants towards other vacancies and employers, even if they have been unsuccessful in applying to a different company.

2. Simplifying the talent pipeline: We can help simplify the technology talent pipeline by reimagining how we advertise digital vacancies and training opportunities. For example, we can reach a larger and more diverse pool of candidates by simplifying the language that we use across our digital vacancies. This might increase engagement with candidates from non-conventional technology and digital backgrounds – allowing us to widen our talent pool and employ people who bring a unique and diverse perspective to the sector.

3. Leveraging expertise and insight: A coalition of like-minded individuals enables us to learn from one another’s expertise and experience, helping us to identify, profile and address the systemic issues that are stifling the UK’s economy. What’s more, the Apprenticeship Connector can also support business leaders and employers to better understand the social impact of the work that they’re doing. With demographic and geographic insight, we can identify and better target under-represented and under-served groups.

Building a Connector Community in Greater Manchester

As part of Microsoft’s UK Get On commitment, we’re committed to helping 30,000 people find jobs in the technology sector in Greater Manchester.

I recently had the pleasure of joining colleagues in the region for an event focused on building a connected talent system, as part of National Apprenticeship Week. After the event, I caught up with Greater Manchester Regional Lead, Marie Hamilton, for her take on how the introduction of Microsoft Connector Community could empower the next stage of the Get On campaign in Greater Manchester, and across the UK. Marie said:

“Greater Manchester is now the fastest growing technology hub in Europe, but to maintain this growth, we need to build a skilled and sustainable digital workforce. Working collectively across sectors and industries, regionally and nationally, allows us to understand and measure the skills gap, as well as enabling us to build a shared plan to tackle it.

Our National Apprenticeship Week event demonstrated huge enthusiasm for using the Connector Community model to further the progress made by Get On – as shown by the attendance from not only our largest private sector customers but also across the public sector, academia, central and local government”.

Marie Hamilton, Greater Manchester Regional Lead

What’s next?

Over the coming months, Microsoft will be holding a series of regional roundtable events to help businesses and organisations understand more about the Microsoft Apprenticeship Connector, and the Connector Community.

To find out more, please visit the Microsoft Apprenticeship Connector platform.

Microsoft Get On

At Microsoft, we believe everyone deserves access to the skills, knowledge and opportunity needed to achieve more. Through our Get On commitment, we’re helping 1.5 million people build tech careers and connecting 300,000 to tech job opportunities.

You can find out more by visiting our Digital Skills Hub, where you’ll find a host of information and resources designed to provide business leaders and employers with insights on how to close the UK’s skills gap, harness new technology and drive innovation.

You can also explore Microsoft Learn, which has an array of certifications, modules and learning pathways designed to help business leaders to upskill employees, as well as supporting individuals to take control of their careers and build vital digital skills.

Find out more

Microsoft Digital Skills Hub

Microsoft Apprenticeship Network

How Microsoft is connecting jobseekers to employers

About the author

I am the UK Apprentice Lead for Microsoft in the HR team. Working with apprenticeships since 2012, I have also worked with SMEs creating, designing, and delivering large corporate apprenticeship programmes. My role at Microsoft is all about creating and developing an apprenticeship strategy that supports our UK business and delivers an exceptional experience for both our apprentices and our business.

The post New connections: how we’re bridging the UK digital skills gap appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

But what if we’re making a false assumption about the trade-off between growth and efficiency? This very question was raised at a stimulating discussion I took part in at the Financial Times Global Banking Summit in London back in December. We were talking about ‘Sustaining a growth mindset: Innovating for consumer needs’, and I was joined by fellow guests Claire Calmejane, Chief Innovation Officer at Societe Generale; Rishi Khosla, CEO and Co-founder of OakNorth Bank; and Andy Ellis, who is CEO of Mettle and Head of Digital Assets at NatWest Group. The event was moderated by Liz Lumley, Deputy Director of The Banker.

How can banks continue digital transformation in a downturn?

Liz Lumley launched the session by providing helpful context. Rising interest rates and inflation are a challenge to both fintech startups and consumers as the cost-of-living crisis looms and funding is constrained. Businesses are more focused on the shorter term, while consumer purchasing decisions are in a state of flux. Nevertheless, the world’s leading lenders continue to invest in technology, data and hyper-personalisation of services. These are seen as necessary steps to retain customer loyalty and improve risk management during uncertain times.

But, we asked ourselves, is digital transformation really delivering revenue growth and profitability fast enough for shareholders? The vulnerability of many fintech businesses at the current time would suggest otherwise.

Data insights that deepen customer relationships

All the participants agreed that data was going to play a central role in the future of banking, not least by providing an accurate and complete view of the customer. In essence, rich data enables banks to make better lending decisions by anticipating changes in businesses’ financial situations. Modern analytics also provide insights that customers want to know about, which gives banks opportunities to deepen client relationships and nurture their loyalty.

Artificial intelligence, sentiment analysis and omnichannel customer engagement are also on the agenda right across the sector. The advent of these technologies has led many established banks to partner with fintechs to improve the developer experience and add to their stock of digital skills.

Integrating with fintechs for better all-round customer value

Delivering more tailored banking services and real-time customer experiences is, no doubt, an attractive proposition. However, despite the temptation to snap up smaller businesses that can deliver these, Andy Ellis of NatWest Group believes fintechs should only be considered for acquisition if they align with a bank’s strategic mission and deliver a specific capability for a defined sector. While there may be no single formula for a successful partnership, effective integration is fundamental. Fortunately, banks are getting better at preserving the agile culture of startups, where so much value lies.

Meanwhile, banking-as-a-service (BaaS) offers significantly more growth potential than traditional banking, in the view of both Andy Ellis and Claire Calmejane. Looking further ahead, Claire also saw potential in greater collaboration around open data. But progress in this area will require an international framework around data standards, secure data exchange and certification.

Advocating industry evolution, not revolution

At Microsoft, we partner with banks to help them deepen and extend their relationships with clients. A key aim is to bolster customer trust through increased responsiveness and security, while anchoring digital transformation initiatives in improved customer experience. In other words, we need ongoing work to build the foundations for innovation rather than a wholesale digital revolution.

Digital transformation is a long-term process, as are the relationships that bankers seek to foster with their clients. Microsoft’s partner network, industry specialisations and technical expertise – as demonstrated by the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services – play a key role in enabling this to happen, as well as helping businesses become more sustainable.

Looking ahead: agile banking operations that accelerate growth

One critical insight this debate revealed was the need for banks to create an efficient digital operating environment that can add products and services quickly while helping to mitigate factors like climate risk. Digital transformation can also help make lending smarter as well as faster, while growing the quantity of lending as well. As Rishi Khosla neatly put it, “The trade-off between operational efficiency and growth isn’t actually a trade-off if you’ve got a good operational environment.”

Find out more

Lead new opportunities and advancements in financial services

Scale to revenue: How to leverage fintech solutions to drive growth

4 ways to deliver a personalized banking experience

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services: Create new value with deeper customer connections

About the author

As Client Director for Microsoft, Janet is responsible for leading the strategic partnership between Microsoft and one of the UK’s leading banks. She focuses on supporting its transformation, anchored on business outcomes and drawing on Microsoft technology and partner solutions to deliver innovation and strategic change. Prior to this, Janet led Industry Strategy for Financial Services, helping customers address industry-wide challenges and innovate for the future of the industry.

Janet has a background in Corporate and Commercial Banking, having joined Microsoft in 2018 from Lloyds Banking Group and previously held roles at Barclays and NatWest. She has a personal interest in cultural transformation and has also played an active role in supporting the inclusion and diversity agenda during her career.

The post How to negotiate uncertainty in banking: aligning growth with efficiency appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

For most of her patient life, the burden of managing both worlds – healthcare and social care – fell on my grandfather, an 80-plus-year-old gentleman with a passion for technology. As her home-based support, he was always eager to help, but often lacked the knowledge and means to do it. No one had ever taught him how to carry out remote monitoring or use blood pressure cuffs. As a result, he frequently struggled to keep my grandmother’s clinician informed in-between visits.

Today, technology is fundamentally changing how care is provided. Modern digital solutions are shifting the industry towards telehealth and remote services. This allows people like my grandparents to receive care at any time, wherever they are.

At the same time, the role of hospitals is changing too.

We’ve long been used to seeing them as patient magnets, but now the paradigm is shifting. As Integrated Care Systems prepare to launch in the UK, hospitals are turning into centres of excellence for clinicians.

That’s something that we at Microsoft want to help achieve. Using technology, we’re working to position hospitals as the lighthouse at the centre of planned and critical treatment. Providing patients with all the clinical coverage and expertise they need, without needing to be physically present.

Delivering unparalleled services in a new era of accessible and equitable care.

From hospital to housepital and hospitel

When I was a young student in Germany, I used to take a very peculiar type of school bus – one that today would be the definition of ‘utilitarian’. During the day, they were taking us to school, but overnight, they could easily be turned into field ambulances. They were capable of hosting some 20 hospital beds in case of necessity. 

Years have passed since then, and yet the concept is still very much the same. If anything, it’s been amplified by the pandemic.

COVID-19 has expanded the way people see hospitals. They can almost be any place where you can safely plug in a laptop and use equipment to treat patients. This has meant repurposing both public-serving spaces. For example, we now talk about hospitels – or private ones, also called housepitals.

Countries around the world are now using hotel rooms as quarantine locations for those needing to self-isolate. Meanwhile, during lockdowns we’ve seen hospitality suites at the Arsenal Stadium being turned into pregnancy clinics. Field hospitals have been set up on the back of mini-buses and conference pavilions became hospital wards. All in the space of weeks.  

Finally, virtual wards and remote care are increasingly taking place in our living rooms and bedrooms, where doctors can check on their patients through online platforms.    

Towards a more hybrid patient journey

As the role of hospitals continues to be redefined, technology and data are reshaping the way health services are provided.  

From the earliest stages of preoperative care, all the way through on-site services to the very end of postoperative care, digital solutions are turning the patient journey into a mix of on and off-site care. This helps organisations cope with demand and make better use of their resources.  

A prime example is Project Breathe, a scheme that I’ve been fortunate to work on and which targets teenage and child patients with cystic fibrosis. Crucial to those suffering from this condition, which affects the lungs, is exercising at least three times a day to keep their breathing normal.

To make sure even the youngest patients commit to it – particularly when at home – Project Breathe has developed a solution that allows children to play computer games while blowing into their spirometer.

This isn’t just helping make the exercise more enjoyable. It also gains key data on the patient’s condition, which can then be analysed to make predictions. All while the patient never leaves home.

Sharing is caring

As a Global Industry specialist, my role is to oversee how Microsoft is helping organisations around the world to implement pioneering technology. That’s something really powerful. It allows me to learn valuable lessons across different countries and apply them to the British healthcare sector.

It’s also a great opportunity to share knowledge and expertise among various organisations and put them in contact for greater collaboration. A great example is the DRIVE initiative that Great Ormond Street Hospital has launched.

Created in collaboration with University College London and Siemens, this initiative brings together doctors, medical device experts and academics. Its goal is to come up with initiatives that inspire care teams to make more and better use of technology in their work.

This, to me, is fundamental to empowering the healthcare sector. Ensuring that all clinics and institutes have the same resources and capabilities is at the heart of providing efficient, reliable care for our communities. As well as the reason why I do this job: For the opportunity to create better access to healthcare and access to better healthcare.  

Making healthcare accessible and equitable

If we really want to realise the idea of ‘hospitals everywhere’, then we need to ensure that everyone has the same technological means to access it. 

This is, in my opinion, one of the biggest challenges the industry is facing. We’re seeing an increasingly strong link between health inequities and digital inclusion. As as result, too many people find themselves underserved and unable to access vital care.

Take my parents, for example. Living in a not-spot, they only get Wi-Fi connectivity when the Edinburgh to London train goes through, thanks to its onboard hotspot. Outside of that, they have to hang the phone out of their bedroom window to get a signal.

How can you run tele consultations when you’re living in these conditions?

That, to me, is where I see partnerships and collaborations like DRIVE to really make the difference. They bring together different types of expertise to make sure that people can receive care wherever they are, however they need it. All while developing affordable solutions, as well as educating people to make the best of them.

Starting out for a new healthcare

I am not usually one to make predictions. However, one thing I know with certainty is that ten years from now, technology will be the deciding factor between successful and unsuccessful organisations. Those of them that have not embraced digital transformation will have a tough time coping.

So how exactly can they get there? What are the first few steps you can take to realise digital transformation at your organisation?

The most important thing when starting off is figuring out where you are today. Take an honest assessment of where you’re starting from. Then, identify an initial two or three goals you want to achieve.

Be realistic about what’s possible and understand your ability to absorb change, as well as where to go and ask for help. Once that comes, the next part is making sure you partner, listen and learn from other organisations.

My advice is also to embrace a risk-taking culture. The unpredictability of COVID-19 has proven that this is crucial.

It’s also shown that when crisis hits, the NHS has proven to itself that it can adapt quickly and deliver some great services. These may not be perfect yet, but they’re a great start to further change and efficiencies.

Microsoft Envision UK

London, May 19 2022
Join us at our first in-person UK conference in over two years where we will explore the road ahead in 2022 and beyond.

Reserve your FREE space now

Find out more

• Drive patient engagement
• 10 real AI applications in healthcare
• A guide to data for healthcare leaders
• Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

About the author

David is currently a Global Industry Specialist for Microsoft with a focus on Healthcare and Life Sciences. He is a highly experienced business strategist and futurist with a technology pivot. David is driven to help address digital exclusion and heath inequities through his work and collaboration with healthcare systems around the globe. He completed his MBA at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, graduating with a distinction. David continues to live in Asia but operate globally. Some of his work includes the strategy on closing the gap in Indonesia’s universal health insurance system of almost 290 million members. His daily mission is to think about how digital transformation we can create better access to healthcare, and access to better healthcare.

The post Hospitals everywhere: The answer to accessible and equitable healthcare? appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

When we talk about app innovation, we’re talking about exploring new ways to become more agile as organisations. I work with a lot of customers in the financial services industry and they all have one thing in common: they want to be more agile.

However being ‘more agile’ means different things to different financial service businesses depending on their starting point. Let’s break down the goal of app innovation into three horizons.

Modernising legacy systems to unlock and drive value

The first horizon is to have app innovation support legacy modernisation. “How can the cloud better optimise and enable the stuff we already run?” The focus is on efficiency: making things easier to manage, less onerous to upgrade, more sustainable. At the other end of the scale, the third horizon is all about the net new. How can app innovation empower us to bring new or better products to market? Or radically transform the way we bring products to market, expand our offerings to new markets, or bring new services online?

The shades of grey in between is the second horizon. The focus here is on things like transformation automation, or even simply moving applications ‘up the stack’. This means moving from manually managing Virtual Machines to leveraging Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings that can help streamline operations. Because innovation doesn’t have to be radical. Sometimes the most effective innovations are the incremental gains where we pay down some of the technical debt we’re carrying, slowly creating more agility, power, and momentum, ultimately allowing our teams to do more with less.

Here I want to unpack a few of these themes and shine a light on the great potential that app innovation in particular offers financial services organisations.

The value of business process automation

Technical debt is an analogy I often use to explain the challenge many financial services organisations face. Just like financial debt, the bigger the amount of technical debt you carry, the more interest you have to pay on it just to stand still.

But if I can pay down some of my technical debt, I can reinvest that interest in accelerating part of my organisation’s momentum in the right direction. For financial services organisations, this second horizon transformation can be extremely powerful.

Say you’re running an application that requires hundreds of virtual machines (VMs) to function. Somebody’s patching those VMs, manually making sure that the middleware on them is up and running. They ensure the connectivity, disaster recovery, the backup plans are all in place. Additionally, they build and maintain the data and applications that deliver business value and run them on those VMs.

If you can move some of that to a platform or service offering that manages that for you such as Azure, you can automate that process and reduce the manual labour. This is what we refer to as ‘moving up the stack’. Patching and updating becomes something you do with configuration. It may seem obvious to developers and development leads, but often the infrastructure status quo hampers the ability to see that bigger picture and build the business case for the move to PaaS. So it’s all about efficiency in the total cost to operate. How do you automate more of what you do, so you can move customers up the stack, free the teams that build these systems to spend less time manually overcoming hurdles and spend more time delivering business value?

Embrace an agile developer culture

A scenario that happens a lot in financial services is developer teams want to experiment with a new service. But they often spend more time filling out paperwork to request the infrastructure they need than it would actually take to do the development. However, by automating the secure creation and management of those environments, we can build agile dev teams.

Within policy controlled environments, we can create sandboxes where within minutes developers can experiment to see if the idea has legs and they want to scale, or if it’s not what they thought it was. Scale fast or fail fast, as they say.

Having the ability to be agile, to experiment, to test and learn, to play with new services quickly in an automated way, means you can genuinely innovate faster. And that is my goal: to unlock our customers’ ability to execute on their innovation and vision.

Develop a culture of innovation and change

When it comes to introducing new technologies, one of the pieces of the puzzle that is often overlooked is process. How do we create a culture of sharing best practise, encouraging reuse – a culture of inner sourcing? How do we encourage the collaboration environments in which developers can share the technology they build within their organisation? How do we promote reusability inside an organisation?

That’s where development collaboration platforms like GitHub become really powerful. It’s not just source control. It helps develop collaboration and empowers developers to reuse assets. You can do that by bringing the open-source approach into your own business and fostering that culture. It’s about saying: within my business, any business unit can take what I’ve built and reuse it or extend it or contribute back to it, but it’s not a public thing.

But a hurdle organisations need to overcome is feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of a cultural transformation. I often hear: “It’s such a big problem. I don’t know where to start. Huge cultural transformation. We’ll never get there.”

The key is to break the process down into bite sized chunks. Start with one key area of the business for one product, a set of workloads or a service line. Demonstrate the value of transformation in a smaller project. You’ll learn a load of lessons on the way about where the organisation is in its readiness to embrace that type of transformation. This may be politics, technology or real capabilities.

From there, you can grow. It typically takes a senior leader who believes in the project and wants to make it happen, as well as an engineering function that’s willing to embrace different ways of working and take onboard learnings from outside the business. But it also takes business units who want to be part of that process. If you’re a business unit and you want to just throw requirements over the fence and hope that somebody deals with them, that’s not going to work. That’s where the cultural change really needs to come together.

AI and innovation to drive customer expereinces

One of the main challenges facing the financial services industry at the moment is changing customer expectations. As consumers, we get instant gratification with the expectation for immediate delivery, instant access to data and service on-demand.  As a result, we have that same expectation of our business interactions. We assume that every business should operate the same way. However in reality, the systems and processes in financial services aren’t geared for that.

At the same time, there is a challenge from FinTech start-ups nipping at the heels of established industry players. They don’t have the same technical debt to carry and are more agile. As a result, they can come at the industry from a very different angle, building services that feel much more like our consumer interactions, are much more data-led, where the experience is the same regardless of interaction – online, via apps, or an intermediary.

Both of these factors create a compelling need to be able to become a differentiator. To move faster, to innovate, to release new products, to meet the customer’s expectation. In the modern world of finance, we need that transformation to flow front to back, from the button I press on my phone through to that being recorded in a ledger somewhere. For insurance companies, it’s more about how we can use data and AI algorithms to calculate risk. If I can automate that process rather than it requiring human intervention, I can write more policies, I can take on more risk as an insurer, or win more business as a broker because I can make the decision much quicker.

These are the business outcomes. And in order to achieve them, we must be comfortable with building modern applications, and doing that rapidly, taking them to market quickly. Just like a FinTech start-up would.

But doing that means being agile, which we can’t be if we’re carrying lots of technical debt. We can’t do that if we’ve got lots of legacy to deal with. That’s where Microsoft can support our financial service partners. To reduce their technical debt. To modernise their processes and infrastructures. To unlock a future of agility, experimentation, and innovation.

Find out more

Imagine digital innovation that delivers a seamless experience with real impact

Drive business performance by empowering developers to innovate

Discover how to scale DevOps practices throughout your organisation

Resources to empower your developer team

Using Azure Pipelines to increase creativity and reduce costs

Introduction to Azure DevOps

About the author

Matt heads up the Digital Transformation & App Innovation team within Microsoft UK’s Solutions business. He leads a team of innovation and development centred Specialists focused on helping customers understand, plan for, and adopt some of the most cutting-edge services in Microsoft’s arsenal – from GitHub for developer productivity, managed container offerings such as Azure Kubernetes Services, PaaS and serverless with Azure Functions and Logic Apps, Integration Services, Event Grid, and more, through to engaging wider stakeholder audiences in the development process through adoption of low-code development with Power Apps.  

Matt’s background is firmly in engineering for innovation. With a master’s in computing and over two decades of experience from hands on ecommerce, payment and billing systems development in the late ‘90s and early 2000’s, to leading a global consulting team designing and rolling out bespoke Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting products for FTSE 10 integrated energy companies, and on to launching an IoT Pet Tracking start-up, founding, building, and selling a Digital Transformation consultancy before joining Microsoft in 2018. 

Consistent to all of Matt’s endeavors is an understanding of what is possible, how it aligns to solving real world business challenges, and always starting with the “Why”.  

The post How to drive innovation and agility in financial services appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Osborne Clarke is an international legal practice with headquarters in London, and offices around the world. The Firm’s goal is to help clients succeed in tomorrow’s world. One of the ways it does that is to equip all its people with the right digital tools, right processes and empower them with the right skills to use those tools effectively.

To empower employees, they took a different approach to the typical linear style taken for digital modernisation.  “When you’re trying to fundamentally change the way people deliver work, its different,” explains Nathan Hayes, IT Director at Osborne Clarke. By directly engaging with people to solve business issues, Osborne Clarke was able to build internal champions. At the same time, they are improving processes and developing best practices to enable its people to work smarter.

Speed up digital modernisation and empower employees

Osborne Clarke had already started to modernise its business ahead of the UK’s shift to remote working in 2020. Employees were already familiar with Microsoft Teams. However, the shift in ways of working was a real driver for tech adoption because they had to use tools like Microsoft Teams to engage and work. “It’s about winning hearts and minds. People were already engaging with technology in ways they never had before,” says Nathan.

Standardising client experiences and ways of working

Osborne Clarke’s Matter Management Group has been a key part of building the processes behind its digital collaboration modernisation. For legal firms, the managing of a matter from conception to delivery needs to not only meet client expectations, but be transparent, compliant and secure to meet employee expectations too.

Osborne Clarke identified that all its people had a different way of working. This created challenges around the consistency of client experiences across the organisation. The Firm’s Matter Management Group set out to standardise the way they delivered legal services across the organisation, taking learnings from the broader business on how they could work more effectively.

“I have worked with the Matter Management Group and the skill set provided is valuable. There is training support on hand when needed and there is an understanding of how legal teams work which means there’s an appreciation of the comments/concerns we raise and the Group is able to explain the technology easily.”

Partner, Corporate, Osborne Clarke

Connecting business silos to aid transparency and reduce risk

Ensuring transparency over processes and documents is one of the most important factors for legal firms to consider. In a traditional firm, documents are paper-based or baked into business silos making transparency difficult to audit and manage.

When connecting business silos together, legal firms can gain visibility over document sharing, updates, and more. As a result of their modernisation, Osborne Clarke can track when a document is pulled out of the management system and shared with clients via email or on Microsoft Teams to manage risk, create visibility and improve client experiences.

Ensuring security and regulatory compliance

Like many industries, security is highly important for the legal sector. Legal firms need to ensure they not only meet the expectations of clients, regulators, and the business, but exceed them. Firms must ensure any technology meets risk and compliance requirements, while being able to take advantage of innovative solutions to transform client experiences.

“We went through a full due diligence exercise in terms of understanding where our audit trails were, what our discovery options were, and where we engage our risk and compliance team. We have to know that we’ve got an absolutely robust platform,” says Nathan.

By conducting a thorough audit of the platform and understanding their audit trails, Osborne Clarke was able to outline where there was a reliance on employees to meet their statutory and regulatory obligations and where they could leverage technology more effectively to save time.

Demonstrating tangible use cases to empower employees

The Matter Management Group worked with teams in the business directly to help solve challenges around working practices and demonstrate how Microsoft Teams can help resolve them. By showing the value of digital technology first-hand within the context of the real day-to-day challenges they were facing, there was a greater chance it would be used. As a result, that they would share their new found understanding more broadly with other colleagues.

“We had a London partner who was looking to improve profitability. We sat down with him and showed him the technologies that could help. He decided he wanted to try Planner and Teams. Then, he codified an entire matter within 24 hours. He sent it out to his team members, assigning tasks in planner. And that was the start of delivering benefits in terms of visibility and in terms of accuracy,” says Nathan.

“I have used Planner within Teams to create the M&A Playbook. The task list is flexible so can be amended for each deal. It can also be assigned to specific people, prioritised in terms of urgency and can set due dates which can be moved if necessary,” says a Partner at Osborne Clarke. “I have found Planner to be incredibly useful and have noticed that junior lawyers are more proactive as they can see the matter set out in tasks from start to finish.”

“Some things I’ve really liked about Planner – it’s very easy to set up and edit the tasks and buckets; It’s useful to be able to tailor what information appears on each task card. For example, on some that are time sensitive I will choose to include deadline details, or if we agree something with the other side which we may need to keep track of later, I can include a small note under the relevant task.”

Associate, Project Finance

Bringing employees along the journey

For Nathan’s team, the most important thing about digital modernisation is to make sure employees are part of the process. This is why the implementation was so successful. The Matter Management Group works directly within business teams to solve build solutions. This means they were not only able to demonstrate the benefit of digital technology on existing processes, but they were also able to equip employees with the right digital skills to work alongside the technology.

“Its great to see how Osborne Clarke have integrated Microsoft Teams in to the firms critical business processes to not only enhance their lawyers productivity but to engage with their clients in a more consistent and effective way. It demonstrates how technology can enable effective change in a secure way when people and processes are closely aligned.”

Karen Grumbt, Account Executive, Legal Sector, Microsoft UK

The future

Nathan believes Osborne Clarke’s journey is far from over. Looking forward, there are ways to automate workflows or paper-based processes. This will not only save time but reduce errors and empowers employees to spend more time with clients.

The secret of Osborne Clarke’s digital modernisation success is its people-first approach. Engaging directly with teams to build solutions that show immediate benefits creates advocates within the business. In addition, ensuring the processes are secure, compliant and transparent, builds not only strong digital proficiency, but creates a more open, collaborative culture.

Find out more

Learn more about Osborne Clarke

Embrace the new world of work eBook

5 ways the legal sector can innovate and empower employees in the future of work

Resources for your development team

Watch the on-demand sessions from Microsoft Build:

Extending the Microsoft Teams experience

Build solutions that span across Microsoft Teams, Viva Connections and SharePoint

About the author

Nathan is IT Director at Osborne Clarke. He has over fifteen years of experience in the strategic delivery of IT into numerous law firms including CMS Cameron McKenna and Bevan Brittan amongst others. Nathan is an active member of the Legal IT community and makes regular contributions at conferences and to a range of legal publications. Prior to moving into the legal sector, he enjoyed extensive experience in a similar capacity within the global distribution sector. When away from the office, Nathan can usually be found surfing whilst attached to a kite, and occasionally being dragged out to sea in a tangle of lines.

Karen is an experienced Account Executive focussed on the Legal Sector at Microsoft. With over five years’ experience working with global law firms, Karen works closely with customers to drive digital transformation and enable them to realise greater business benefit through Microsoft technology.

The post How law firms can securely empower employees and optimise processes appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Let’s dissect this a little. Firstly, what is culture? It’s quite an ethereal term and one I have often struggled with. Someone once shared a simple definition that resonated with me: Culture is “what you do when your boss isn’t watching”. Culture is something ingrained into how you work and think, which is important. You can’t simply say you have a culture as an organisation. You must live and breathe the culture.

And what do we mean when we say data-driven? It’s not about collecting all data. In fact, lack of data isn’t a problem for most organisations! However, what they often struggle with is extracting value from that data. Therefore, what we are really talking about is decisions that are driven from data. Because we use the data to inform and justify our decisions, it needs to be good quality.

So, a data-driven culture is one where the organisational norm is that decision making is driven by data. How can leaders successfully build this culture? If we look at the journey to a data-driven culture, I think of four steps.

1. Create the right mindset for a data-driven culture

To me this is the most crucial step – leadership must be clear. I don’t just mean that leaders need to talk about using data. Leaders need to demonstrate how they place data at the heart of what the organisation is trying to achieve every day.

In order to thrive, leaders must be clear about what their organisation’s purpose and outcomes are. A great way to create accountability and direction is to tie those purposes and outcomes to measures of success.

At Microsoft, we use an approach called Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to organise and align our activities to transform. The focus on key results inspires a data-driven mindset across the organisation. It also provides a common data driven focus and language for everyone in the business – we all start to think about the measures that matter.

2. Find organisational and individual value in a data-driven culture

When looking at driving change I have to say that unfortunately we, as humans, can be a selfish bunch. Often, one of the biggest drivers of successful change is understanding what is in it for the individual. Within Microsoft we apply the PROSCI change methodology. At the heart of this is the ADKAR change model. There is the adage: organisations don’t change, people do. ADKAR is an acronym for five elements of change for individuals:

• Awareness of the need to change.
• Desire to participate and support the change.
• Knowledge on how to change.
• Ability to implement desired skills and behaviours.
• Reinforcement to sustain the change.

To embed the change within our people and therefore to drive change in the organisation, we really need to create the desire to change. If people are told the future is a data-driven culture they simply won’t buy into it and commit to it. Therefore, demonstrating change and demonstrating value from data fast is important. When people see that the change works and is more effective, they’ll want to change.

3. Build your and your employee’s skills

If we are working on changing our mindsets, we also need to prepare our people with the right skills and tools. Everyone needs basic data literacy skills and we all different levels of knowledge. Some people have inherent data literacy skills. Others may need support to be able to understand and assimilate data then interpret and analyse it. Then, once we have the basics in place, we need to progress to understand how we can use the tools at our disposal to answer the business question we have. However, we can’t just throw tools like Excel, Tableau and PowerBI at our people and expect them to be able to optimise and transform our organisations.

Leaders need to help their employees on their learning journey by democratising data access, building learning opportunities and give employees the time to take those opportunities. One way you can do this is to build re- and upskilling into employee KPIs. In our data journey we move from a data consumer to data analyst, citizen data scientist and beyond. Not everyone starts in the same place. Everyone’s learning path is different and the KPIs need to reflect that.

Microsoft provides access to great learning tools to support you and your employee’s individual journey. These include Microsoft Learn – the front door to all your training needs whether you are just starting out or an experienced professional, with role-based learning paths. You can also explore how to use AI in your organisation with the Microsoft AI Business School.

4. Empower employees with the right tools

So, now you’ve changed your mindset and the mindset of your organisation. You’ve seen the value of a data-driven organisation and are building relevant skills. But what tools do leaders need to get insights?

Firstly, organisations need quality, curated data that is easily accessible. Not everyone in the business is a data engineer who can find, cleanse and prepare data for analytics. You need an easy way for everyone in an organisation to find the business data that they need. It also needs to be presented in a manner that is easily understandable – using the language they understand. This is where a data marketplace or data catalogue is invaluable. At Microsoft we have Azure Purview, our unified data governance platform. This is a platform that automatically discovers data wherever it lives in your organisation. It can classify data and identify data lineage; but importantly it also presents a data catalogue of your data using business language. The data catalogue is a core element of a successful self-service strategy.

Using self-service data insights tools like PowerBI provides easy access to pre-prepared and certified datasets. This enables your people to be confident in the quality of the data source and empowers them to discover new insights from the data. It also allows the data owners can enable controls to ensure colleagues can only see the data they need to.

A continuous journey to a data-driven culture

These four steps will help you build a data-driven culture. I also want to remind you of the final step in ADKAR: Reinforcement! It’s critical that this is not seen as a one-off initiative. You need to work hard at reinforcing the change to build a successful data-driven culture. If people don’t use these new skills, mindset and tools, it is the case of use it or lose it. This can be tough – but creating a champion network focused on data is a wonderful way to organically drive and embed the culture.

Find out more

Build a data-driven organisation

Peer to peer interview: Unite your data strategy and culture

Create a data culture

About the author

James is a Digital Advisor in Microsoft Consulting Services. He is focussed on helping customers realise their business outcomes and purpose by enabling their digital transformation with advanced cloud technologies – with a particular focus on data, AI, automation and sustainability. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2014, James held several roles across financial services (HSBC, Schroders), public sector (Scottish Water) and consulting (PwC).

The post The role of leadership in a successful data-driven culture appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.