Why it’s everybody’s business

An uncertain business climate presents many challenges for businesses. The threats of falling revenues, higher customer attrition and uncertain cashflow are all putting pressure on companies to streamline operations, improve service levels and cut costs. At the same time, businesses need to maintain a focus on future growth and market opportunities.

The key to achieving this balance is to equip employees with the right tools to help them do their job efficiently and flexibly, and with the right information to help them make the right decisions. Companies that take a top-down approach to business strategy are completely missing the point.

As every MT reader knows, the most important assets in a business are its people – their ideas, their relationships with customers and the value they bring to the organisation.
This value can take various forms, whether it is a salesforce delivering better customer service, operations staff accessing and sharing information and best practice across company boundaries, easy transference of business insight across the organisation to improve strategic decision-making, or an IT department driving down costs through better use of technology.
Practical case studies on these pages demonstrate how real people in businesses across a range of industries are using technology to achieve their key business goals and deliver value throughout their organisation.

At Microsoft, we believe that driving value through technology is not about implementing large-scale and costly IT projects. As these stories prove, the entire business can benefit from equipping each one of its people with the best tools, allowing them to work better, faster and smarter. This, in turn, translates to money saved or made, gains in efficiency, the sharing of essential information to promote agility and innovation, and market opportunities seized.

Robert Epstein, head of sales and marketing for small and medium business at Microsoft UK