Microsoft Inspire Conference: Digital Transformation

TSG is bringing you the latest on what’s happening at the Microsoft Inspire conference, hosted in Washington DC. Follow us on Twitter for the latest news and updates from our team. 

At this morning’s Microsoft Inspire keynote it was all about customer success. The presentation picked up on a theme that Satya has talked about on numerous occasions: it’s not about the technology, it’s about what customers achieve with the technology.

It’s all about understanding how businesses operate and focusing on business outcomes.

We heard from Cubic, who creates intelligent transportation systems in major cities across the globe.

Its solution helps to improve traffic flow and that’s a crucial element in the economic success of any city – and let’s face it, nobody wants to be stuck in traffic or miss the next train.

There’s going to be a big shift to industry solutions, creating solution maps and they talked about creating a ‘book of dreams’ to help get people inspired and envision what’s possible.

So what questions do you need to ask yourself – or should we be asking you – that will drive digital transformation?

We were treated to 4 stories of digital transformation that are already happening. The stand out for me was a project to address the spread of HIV in South Africa.

It’s a project called 90 90 90 aimed at building awareness, providing treatment and achieving sustainable long term outcomes.

Patient consultations and treatment programmes were previously recorded on spreadsheets and getting any kind of overall picture of the impact of the project was almost impossible to track.

Capturing real-time information has made a huge impact with results improving dramatically within 6 months.

They were also able to pinpoint issues with patients stopping treatment because they felt a short-term improvement. But that was having a negative impact on the third ‘90’ so it was something they were able to address and reverse.

Staffing levels in certain areas were also affecting the level of success and again the business intelligence dashboards allowed them to drill into specific issues. Very similar to some of the stuff that our own Stuart Wannop covers in his BI demonstrations but we’re not working on anything quite so life transforming (although Newcastle United fans might disagree).

The system that was originally built on SQL server is now migrating to Azure, they’re building predictive models, addressing other diseases and issues. And they’re adopting Office 365 and Microsoft Teams to help collaborate and avoid the perennial issue of critical documents sitting on individual machines.

Interesting to see that they’ve done the really difficult stuff first – but as we know digital transformation is definitely not a linear process.

Time to run off to another session. More blogs will follow but at least I’m sticking to the promise I made last week.

You may also be interested in: Microsoft Inspire: An inspiring first keynote