Free Microsoft Whitepapers

Whitepaper: The People Ready Business
Inside your company is a powerful force: a force that can cut costs, win customers, and find innovative new business opportunities.

It’s your people. Are you ready?

Businesses don’t garner insights or make decisions. Businesses don’t close deals, invent new products, or find new efficiencies. People do. Companies excel when they empower their people to drive the business forward.

Strategies, organization, motivation, and leadership all set the stage for business success. But to see results, you also have to give your people the right tools, information, and opportunities—because success ultimately comes down to your people. We call a business that fosters a winning environment a “people-ready business.”

Software is instrumental to the people-ready business. Software is increasingly how we harness information, the lifeblood of business today. Software enables people to turn data into insight, transform ideas into action, and turn change into opportunity.

Whitepaper: Drive Business Processes - Achieving the "Last Mile" of Business Productivity
Since the mid-1990s, businesses have poured billions of dollars into implementing ERP, supply chain, and CRM systems to help them “re-engineer” work processes, eliminate inefficiencies, increase productivity, and drive business change. These efforts have met with varying degrees of success. Clearly global productivity has risen steadily, and many businesses owe their very survival to improvements that would have been impossible without radical changes to business process systems. But just as clearly, many of these promises to dramatically increase business success have proven overly optimistic for many. Why is this? Is there another way of looking at business processes that retains the positive aspects of large-scale system change, while minimizing its weaknesses and addressing unmet objectives?

At Microsoft, we’re working to provide a better way. We believe that the key to helping businesses become more agile and productive in the global economy is to empower individual workers – giving them tools that improve efficiency and enable them to focus on the highest-value work, and a new generation of software is an important ingredient to make this happen.