Jean-Philippe Courtois: New World of Work, The Netherlands

Jean-Philippe Courtois Remarks - Erasmus University/Rotterdam School of Management
Rotterdam, The Netherlands
November 9, 2010


Thank you Erik and thank you all for having me today. It’s an honor to be here with you.

I understand that this is the Week of New World of Work in The Netherlands, organized by the Foundation for Nature & Environment and supported by many organizations, including Microsoft. There is no place in the world where there is more emphasis on this phenomenon of the New World of Work than here in The Netherlands. Sometimes I wonder whether New World of Work is a Dutch invention, as it is so closely aligned to Dutch culture: it is about transparency, openness and becoming networked. And indeed Dutch people are very transparent, open, direct and uninterested in organizational hierarchy... yes, I think the New World of Work must have been invented here!

The concept of the New World of Work is something that we’ve been thinking about at Microsoft for the past 5 years. The concept was introduced by Bill Gates following one of his famed “Think Weeks” where he’d disconnect for a week and focus on big ideas. One output of this particular Think Week in 2005 was a whitepaper which started a deep dialogue in our company that’s on-going still today.

Many people think of the New World of Work as finding a way to work wherever you are… a concept for workaholics or people like me who spend most of their time on a plane and try very hard to balance work with family in the most optimal way. However we look at it as much more.

Even back in 2005, Bill talked about the New World of Work in terms of “making sense of the information people have -- giving them the ability to focus, prioritize and apply their expertise, visualize and understand key data, and reduce the amount of time they spend dealing with the complexity of an information-rich environment.” The New World of Work puts people at the center, making information technology work for them to help make their lives easier.

The Microsoft team here in the Netherlands took that whitepaper from Bill and decided to make it their “North Star” or guiding principle for how they designed and ran their business. Their goal was clear: to implement the New World of Work to show the world (and certainly our Dutch customers and partners) how this concept could work to enable people and businesses to realize their full potential.

Around the same time in 2005, we began a partnership with the Rotterdam School of Management. Why? Because this was a University that was willing to be a true collaborator with us on creating from scratch the blueprint for the New World of Work. We knew then that to do this right, we needed all the insights and intelligence available and needed a world class partner like RSM. This university developed a model by which we could assess progress, and the results of the latest assessment will be presented by Professor Erik van Heck later today. I want to thank RSM for the partnership during the last 5 years, which has proven to be invaluable in our learnings around the New World of Work, not only for us, but also for many other organizations.

Two brief examples of this are Rabobank and the trade-union De Unie, which both participated in the RSM-research from the beginning and have been invaluable partner-organisations in this journey. Both are in the process of implementing the New World of Work, using the research they have done with RSM, including benchmarking information relative to each other and Microsoft.

Looking at the broader impact of the collaboration with RSM, in the last 2.5 years Microsoft Netherlands has hosted more than 90,000 individuals at our offices at Schiphol -- both private and public organizations, including NGOs and students – who were interested in learning more about the New World of Work and what it might be able to do for them. As a result, we know of more than 200 organizations have now started their own journeys toward adopting The New World of Work, thereby improving their productivity and their employee satisfaction and reducing their operational costs and carbon footprint.

Obviously when Bill Gates started thinking about how to tackle the New World of Work, ICT was at the center of the equation to be solved. Five years in, technology continues to accelerate and improve the way people communicate, collaborate and organize. This is one of the things I love most about technology – it is constantly changing, adapting and enabling scenarios we previously only dreamed were possible.

With each new innovation in technology, we see new opportunities for lowering of costs, increasing productivity and inclusion, improving customer service, advancing science and education, and reducing our carbon footprint. It’s this massive and imposing set of possibilities that keeps me motivated and coming back for more every day after 26 years at Microsoft.

The most important trend happening today in ICT is cloud computing. For those who may not know what it is, the simplest way to define cloud computing is to use the analogy of electricity. Today you flip the switch when you need lights or power and you get a bill at the end of the month based on your usage, provided by the electric company who manages the power station. In the technology realm, cloud computing is a new paradigm through which people can access computing power, applications and collaboration tools as a service, from a provider like Microsoft managing a large datacenter, and paying only for what they use.

The cloud is a true enabler of the New World of Work as it gives businesses elasticity, which is a game changer because with the cloud, renting 1 machine for 1,000 hours will be equivalent to renting 1,000 machines for 1 hour. This will enable businesses and other organizations to rapidly accomplish complex tasks that were previously prohibited by cost or time constraints. It will enable new applications to be rapidly deployed as IT departments no longer need to worry about the back-end infrastructure to support them. The cloud will also enable experimentation in a way that we believe will lead to advances in science, environmental sustainability, medicine and other important fields.

One great example of this in action is the work we started in 2008 with the European Environment Agency or the EEA on an initiative called Eye on Earth. At the heart of this five-year collaboration is a web portal, designed to help governments, policymakers and individuals share critical information on European water soil, air and ozone indicators, via the cloud. Eye on Earth is designed to bring complex strands of information together into a single, simple-to-use and easy-to-understand application — so, as more data and user findings are posted on the portal, the scientists at EEA can access it to determine and report out on how climate change affects the way we live and how the way we live affects the environment.

The project combines Microsoft's technical experience with European political priorities and individual activism to create a tool which will help to preserve the environment and to increase European health and safety. If you recall Bill’s quote from 2005, he said the New World of Work should help “make sense of the information people have -- giving them the ability to focus, prioritize and apply their expertise, visualize and understand key data, and reduce the amount of time they spend dealing with the complexity of an information-rich environment.”

This website, Eye on Earth, is one excellent example of the New World of Work in action – allowing anyone who’s invested in the European environment, be they individual citizens, policy makers or EEA scientists, to contribute to and understand a complex set of data that will inform society. It’s the kind of initiative we only dreamed possible a decade ago, and the fact is that we’re only just beginning to tap the potential of what cloud computing can do to advance the New World of Work and society at large.

One thing we do know today is that there will always be a “New” New World of Work. If there’s anything that’s constant in this industry, it is change. As technology continues to evolve, so will the standards to which we hold ICT and ourselves as a leading technology company.

In the five years the Microsoft team here in the Netherlands has been working on applying the New World of Work to their daily operations, we’ve seen some great results. They’ve done a wholesale redesign of the office space in Amsterdam, cutting back on unnecessary space to reduce real estate costs by 30 percent. They’ve also worked to enforce the use of Microsoft’s communications software, helping reduce their telco costs by an astonishing 50 percent. There’s not a business or government leader I talk to in Europe (or frankly anywhere in the world) today who can dismiss the potential for this kind of savings.

They’ve also managed to minimize travel requirements, reducing their carbon footprint by 21% since 2007. They are working toward getting that number to 30% by 2012, and I am confident they will.

On the human front, one of the benefits of optimizing toward the New World of Work is the possibility of better work/life balance. The RSM research tells us that employee empowerment is one of the most important drivers for employee satisfaction and productivity, and therefore we’ve done a great deal of work with our own leaders to develop their skills in this regard. Work/life balance is something we measure internally at Microsoft annually, and we’ve seen a 40% improvement in those scores over the past 5 years. I’m also quite proud to say that Microsoft was named by the Great Place To Work Institute as The Best Place to Work in the Netherlands in 2009 and again this year.

I know the Microsoft team here has been very creative in their thinking and very willing to experiment and take risks in their efforts toward optimizing for this ever-moving target of the New World of Work. This is incredibly important for us because as Microsoft, we feel a responsibility to lead and to take ownership of the impact ICT has on organizations and on society – both directly through our work and indirectly through the work of our partners. Here in the Netherlands, we have an ecosystem of more than 6000 partners, and we know that our collective impact is much more significant to this market than any impact we could have alone.

For example, as part of our New World of Work initiative, we and several of our partners participated in a pilot on Digital Mobility, initiated by a government taskforce and targeted at SMBs in the Greater Amsterdam Area. The goal of the pilot was to minimize traffic congestion and therefore carbon footprint, through the usage of ICT and the cloud. To be successful, it required a public/private partnership to implement the digital capabilities (the cloud) but also the ‘mental mobility’ of participants who could effectively lead and deal with the change management required to work differently. More than 60 organizations actively participated, 36 of which have already adopted key learnings to adapt to a new way of working. Based on its initial success, the pilot will be rolled out to 5 additional regions in the first half of next year.

In summary, we know that the New World of Work is a concept with substantial benefits for organizations of all sizes which are interested in improving their productivity and transparency as well as their organizational, economic and ecological sustainability. We believe deeply that the advantages presented by cloud computing will only accelerate these benefits, as it enables the increasingly seamless flow of information between individuals and organizations, regardless of location or device they’re using to access it.

At Microsoft, we’re committed to leading this change. In fact today, 90% of our Microsoft developers are focused on building solutions for the cloud. We believe deeply that this is the future and that the ICT industry and in fact society at large are headed toward the cloud, whether they know it yet or not!

But as always, change is hard. It requires a willingness to change and committed leaders. It also requires intense collaboration between the business, government and scientific sectors. No one has all the answers yet, and it is only through strong partnerships such as the one we have here with the Rotterdam School of Management that we’ll all continue to challenge one another and push through the cloud toward the “New” New World of Work, to the benefit of all.

Thank you for your time today.