Bill Gates’ email: Beyond Business Intelligence

Today there is a new email from Bill Gates posted on the executive email page on Microsoft.com, “Delivering a Comprehensive Approach to Enterprise Information Management.” In it, he discusses how technology has transformed the way businesses work over the last ten years, and how our upcoming product releases will continue to change the landscape. The mail is on the Executive Email Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail (you can also subscribe to get future emails).

From Bill’s mail:

“…there are times when it feels like all of these changes have overwhelmed the tools we use to do our day-to-day jobs. I wanted to share my thoughts on this important issue with you and other business decision makers and IT professionals.

“The problem, really, is twofold. The first is information overload. Faced with the endless deluge of data that is generated every second of every day, how can we hope to keep up? And in the struggle to keep up, how can we stay focused on the tasks that are most important and deliver the greatest value?

“The other problem is something I call information underload. We’re flooded with information, but that doesn’t mean we have tools that let us use the information effectively. Companies pay a high price for information overload and underload. Estimates are that information workers spend as much as 30 percent of their time searching for information, at a cost of $18,000 each year per employee in lost productivity. Meanwhile, the University of California, Berkeley predicts that the volume of digital data we store will nearly double in the next two years.”

Bill goes on to note that Microsoft is focused on creating software that addresses specific businesses priorities:

• Productivity


• Collaboration


• Business intelligence


• Workflow optimization

See the email for more on this and a mention of an enhanced search tool called Knowledge Network for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and a test version of Windows Live Search “as a one-stop entry point for finding information on the desktop, the intranet and the Web.”