“The digital organizations that will succeed in this new new normal situation will be those that will develop along three lines: Empowerment (managing to empower people to express their full potential), Engagement (work on the corporate culture, sharing of objectives and purpose) and Employability (ie the continuous technological learning of the worker, knowing how to carry out their tasks with all the tools that technology gradually makes available). “These are the” 3 E ” so dear to Luba Manolova, director of the Microsoft 365 Division of Microsoft Italy. Born in Bulgaria, Sofia, she has lived in Italy for 23 years where she has carried out her studies and professional experiences. Among these, a seven-year period in Vodafone before arriving at the Italian headquarters of the IT giant of Redmond. “I brought the experience in the world of mobile and fixed communications with me to Microsoft,” he explains, “to arrive in a technological and digital company that, moreover, has been in full smart working for a decade.”
She is responsible for Italian Microsoft 365 and therefore also for the Microsoft Teams communication platform which in a few months has reached 75 million global users.
“At the basis of this success there are several factors, first of all the integration with the productivity suite and with the Windows operating system, the red thread that binds everything safely”, explains Manolova. “Our aim is to connect people and work groups in an intelligent way, making it easier and faster to achieve their goals. We help companies and citizens to be antifragile and flexible, in a very particular moment such as this of emergency and great discontinuity. The key is the intelligent cloud that connects to the intelligent edge, or to all devices, from wearables to mobile and fixed ones, to build ever more innovative experiences. Satya Nadella he said: we started in an emergency phase that required an immediate response, while now we are entering a phase of recovery and we must help the business to grow and transform by capitalizing on this experience. Together with technology, we have somehow redefined the very concept of work “.
Suddenly changing work can show all the power of the opportunity it has in it. But sometimes it risks confusing the worker.
“Yes – observed the manager Microsoft – we all had a change in the way we work and as a reflection a strong transformation of skills. Not only that. The office is no longer the workspace par excellence but it is one of the many spaces we have available. Then the ways of relationship and collaboration between people change. It is above all us, people in ways fully digital, having to pay attention to managing our personal time. The boundaries between work and life are very loose, often intertwined. Here, we have to be good at managing everything. “
How have companies responded to this forced digitalization?
“In two months we have experienced a digital transformation which generally takes at least two years, especially in Italy. In a short time we have reached 8 million people in smart working, which I prefer to call digital working, while only a few months earlier it was just 500 thousand. Crazy. Some companies were very reluctant to enable employees to do this, but they did it. It’s not easy because everything changes: instead of checking how long people are in the office, the measure of performance becomes work. Not all of them were ready for this. The bigger ones benefited because they had already started a path of change in this sense. A wonderful discovery for us at Microsoft was not only private companies but also public administrations, just like that: we have seen important digitization processes, as in the case of the Ministry of Justice, which in a few days was able to put all the mag educated in the conditions to carry out criminal and civil trials remotely “.
The small realities are those that have had to be reinvented. And in a hurry …
“We noticed that many companies, even the smallest ones, began to imagine new ways of doing their job in the recovery phase. And here Teams came into play: dialogue, exchanging ideas with colleagues and customers is never it was so simple and safe, protecting sensitive data and intellectual property. Well, they made the most of it. There are many virtuous examples, I can think of Ciacci Piccolomini D’Aragona’s Digital Wine Tasting: customers receive wines and then they connect by videoconference directly with the winery, the oenologists and the managers of the company. These are experiences like these, those that will guide us in the near future. The furniture in this context is increasingly important because it is now our life. The success of Microsoft 365 is to always put the person at the center and enable new digital experiences. “
Microsoft Teams records record numbers. Even competitors are not watching.
“We continually improve. By adding functions one after the other. Thanks to artificial intelligence and the development of cognitive services we break down all language and accessibility barriers. And chat in various groups and in one-to-one one are translatable into 53 languages in real time. The growth is exponential, we have 75 million daily users of Teams in the world. In Italy, in just one month we recorded a 775% increase in calls and monthly meetings of Teams “.
What are you doing for free users?
“We have just released some very important features for free accounts, allowing them to schedule meetings, apply personalized backgrounds and even take advantage of subtitling in real time (for now only in the US but soon it will also come to us). New functions not only for work groups, but also for groups of friends. We can now send photos, videos, geolocation, you can use the OneDrive cloud to store files and to access the entire Microsoft 365 suite, always dedicated to sharing and sharing. safety”.
It seems to understand that distance learning stayat an option for school.
“Here too we have made incredible numbers in terms of growth. Both schools and universities have given us great satisfaction. More than 70 percent of universities are now on Teams. The University of Bologna, in just four days, 90% of the lessons on Teams were put in place, guaranteeing an indispensable continuity of teaching activities. We have more than one million students active on Teams throughout Italy and 100,000 teachers have been trained. Here too more and more functions: all participants are now visible , we went from 9 to 49, and the teachers can better follow the pupils, who, with a simple click, can ideally raise their hands to ask questions as it is done in the classroom, they can study in small groups with the so-called Breakout Room and then go back to school when the project is ready. There is also a waiting room where the teacher gives access to the lesson only to the students who must actually follow it. They are Education accounts at which they have advantageous conditions compared to company accounts, of course, while for students it is of course all free. But that’s not all: professors can take advantage of artificial intelligence and data analytics functions that allow you to have a view on student participation, on the level of engagement, to trace the degree of satisfaction compared to what has been done “.
Second lei in Italy who needs to be trained more digitally, the company or the user?
“Both of them, I tell the truth, because even the same companies have gaps and in a world fulland digital we are dealing with a constant growth in cyber crime. So companies have to train both system administrators and employees themselves on how to manage identities, passwords, devices, applications, data, information and infrastructures. As organizations become increasingly digital and distributed, it is crucial to urgently examine new scenarios and new threat vectors. The cloud can help because it offers proactive and predictive protection thanks to applied artificial intelligence and machine learning. At Microsoft, we invest over a billion a year in cybersecurity. As many as 3,500 engineers work every day to protect our Microsoft platform and therefore all our Microsoft 365 and Teams customers. Trust and privacy are two issues that are very dear to us, which we care about and on which we constantly invest “.
What will remain of this experienca? Will everything return as before or will we seize the new opportunities?
“Surely there will be a new awareness, I am convinced that in this field too we will live a new normalcy, it will no longer be the same as before. More than 77 percent of those who did digital working says he will want to continue working from home. The flexibility that we have somehow gained during this period is seen as an acquired right. And this brings with it some important reflections. It is very important that those who work are always immersed in a constant and continuous learning process. This new normal has changed some points of reference. Microsoft’s task is to support this change, combining our decades of experience in smart working with innovation. The task of managers at this stage is to guide innovation, especially by listening to the younger generations, from whom we can learn a lot. They are not indifferent agents of change. Continuous learning, open-mindedness, flexibility, curiosity and empowerment can lead to a new dimension. For Italy it could be a turning point above all if we can take inspiration from this forced digitalization “. (d.v.)
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