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The Microsoft 365 tools the Jefferies Group use complement their nimble approach, helping them to provide better insight and expertise to investors, companies, and government entities.
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Using Microsoft 365 cloud-based workplace services, EMCOR will be able to collaborate more effectively across multiple divisions and business units.
The post EMCOR Group transitions to the cloud, constructs intelligent workplace with Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.
Landscape architect by day, Microsoft Excel artist by night. Australia native Emma Stevens isn’t your average artist. She uses spreadsheets to create skyline imagery out of text.
Inspired by the Melbourne skyline, Stevens began to create her artwork in a spreadsheet by building an image of the city with words through a spreadsheet app. She added an image of the Melbourne skyline to the background of a spreadsheet, typed the word “Melbourne” in the cell rows, and divided the columns to define each building. Using column breaks and letter shading, Stevens gave each building depth. From a distance, the image looks like the Melbourne skyline, but up close it becomes clear that the name of the city makes up the structure of the entire image.
The boundless potential of a completely blank canvas can sometimes overwhelm an artist. Stevens says the structure of the spreadsheet software helps her stay focused and dive into her work for hours each day. She appreciates the combination of creativity and repetition. “The Excel spreadsheet became a labor of love. I could redo elements that didn’t quite work, or change the tone or color of certain buildings to improve the composition and depth.”
Technology has opened up new possibilities for artists like Stevens. “Using technology was another way to create precision in art. It also gave me the flexibility to ‘undo,’ which is a freedom I do not get with pen on paper.” Stevens doesn’t consider herself an Excel power user, either. With just the basics, she brought her vision to life. “All I needed to look into was how to create macro buttons. Now I can overlay an image of the skyline to work from that I turn off and on so it’s easier to use as a reference,” explains Stevens.
It doesn’t end with the skyline of Melbourne. As for future artwork, Stevens says, “I’ve thought of doing a few other works such as images of musician faces made with song lyrics, or images of people’s kids using their favorite storybook.” She also has plans for a few more Spreadsheet Skylines of other cities around the world such as New York, London, and Tokyo.
As always, we’d love to hear from you, so please send us your thoughts through UserVoice—and keep the conversation going by following Excel on Facebook and Twitter.
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Today’s post was written by Richard Zotov, Group CIO at ERM.
The sustainability industry addresses the complex balancing act between supporting socioeconomic development and ensuring the healthy future of our environment and our communities. ERM employees are passionate about helping to shape a sustainable future with the world’s leading organizations. We work with the majority of Fortune 500 companies, whose activities—from drilling oil to discovering the next miracle drug—have an enormous impact on us all. Because sustainability means something different for every customer, like exploring clean energy sources or guaranteeing an ethical supply chain, ERM employees must be skilled, flexible, and agile in how they approach each engagement.
It is my goal as CIO to make sure this amazing group of more than 5,000 individuals have the best tools at their disposal as they collaborate in creative teams across 40 countries to help our customers achieve their unique business and sustainability goals. So we made the strategic decision to harness technology and data to digitalize and transform how we work. That’s when we deployed Microsoft 365 across our entire organization, from administrators in our 160 offices to mobile consultants gathering data in the field. Today, ERM employees have new tools to work faster, better, and safer, accelerating the positive, global impact of the work we do.
Now that everyone uses the same Microsoft 365 toolkit to collaborate, harness data, and streamline operations, we have a unified foundational layer for our new workplace culture. We’re connecting our entire business to be more efficient. And when it comes to security, we can meet our customers’ high standards and enhance the credibility of our security position with the Microsoft cloud platform.
This workplace transformation is really a two-pronged approach to remaining at the forefront of the sustainability industry. First, we harness technology and data to accelerate our sustainability and environmental health and safety services. The second involves looking at how we develop new revenue streams as an offshoot of our newly digitalized way of doing business.
With Microsoft 365, we are making headway with the first goal. It’s part of an enterprise-wide push to focus on exceptional customer value. For example, we have technologically transformed how we collect, store, and manage data during site investigation, one of our biggest service lines. Onsite data collection used to be a laborious manual process. Today, we use Microsoft 365 to help digitalize data collection—consultants take tablets into the field for data input and upload it for storage in the Microsoft cloud where it’s available in real-time for colleagues to analyze back at the office. Now our customers receive our reports in easily consumable Power BI dashboards, as opposed to lengthy write-ups, and we’re delivering insightful data into the hands of our customers faster.
As we gain experience in transforming our service lines using Microsoft cloud services, among others, we’ll be in a better position to explore new digital opportunities that help add value to the work we do for customers. This strategy will keep us at the leading edge of technology innovation and help maintain our competitive advantage.
As we work with the intelligent tools within the Microsoft 365 cloud platform, we empower our employees to deliver value to our customers—helping them achieve that balance between doing business and being a conscious steward of the environment. It’s great to know that ERM is adding to the global dialogue on sustainability, contributing to a healthier future for the planet.
—Richard Zotov
Read the ERM case study for more on their move to a modern workplace with Microsoft 365.
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Today’s post was written by Mike Meadows, vice president and chief technology officer at Eli Lilly and Company.
We have an expression at Lilly that inspires our workforce every day: the patient is waiting. This mindset informs our culture, encourages us to work faster, and helps us deliver on the promise to make life better for patients everywhere. It’s behind everything we do at Lilly—from chasing a molecule in a lab to developing new ways to engage with patients, and even troubleshooting a server or network issue.
Our challenge continues to be the discovery of new therapies and accelerating their time-to-market. The process is too slow—and while clearly difficult and complex, our ability to get faster is key. We need to forge new partnerships, comply with a complex regulatory environment, keep quality and safety at the forefront, and reduce costs. All of these seemingly conflicting elements put significant pressure on how we fulfill our promise.
Lilly is responding to these challenges with new thinking across our business process cycle. Through discovery research, product development, manufacturing, and customer engagement, we are working on next-generation capabilities to improve our speed and productivity.
Our workplace environment, and how we interact with one another, is certainly not exempt from such transformation, and in part will be supported by Microsoft 365 cloud technologies. We could see that Microsoft has made great strides in its own transformation to better meet customer needs, and that certainly played a role in our interest in Microsoft technologies for our own workplace transformation goals.
Fostering seamless collaboration and creative teamwork globally is key as we need different ideas to come together to generate new capabilities and products. That’s basically the definition of innovation, and innovation is our lifeblood. With facilities around the world in research and development (R&D), manufacturing, and administrative services, our ability to collaborate across diverse cultures, ways of thinking, and languages has a huge impact on accelerating our product innovation workstreams and our promise to patients.
We’ve been using Microsoft Exchange Online and Office apps for years, but the enhanced interoperation between tools like Microsoft Teams and innovative devices such as Surface Hub and HoloLens has the potential to take collaboration to the next level.
In discovery research today, we have two primary working environments: the laboratory, where scientists in lab coats conduct their experiments in isolation from their colleagues; and the traditional office space occupied by administration and leadership. Not much collaboration happens in real time between these environments. If a scientist has a brilliant idea in the lab, to act on it or share it with colleagues requires them to stop what they’re doing, take off their gear, and return to the office to phone or email someone.
We envision dissolving these physical barriers through something we call “in-lab collaboration”—putting communication and collaboration tools inside our labs that empower scientists to share a creative spark with other scientists across the globe, or with the clinical development manager just upstairs. Using Surface Hubs to whiteboard ideas, making Office 365 video calls, and chatting in real-time through Teams foster innovation at scale and can help ensure that great ideas don’t get lost.
In today’s healthcare environment, we’re working more and more with innovators outside the company itself. We’re looking at new scenarios where Lilly might run experiments in a cost-effective arrangement called “lab-as-a-service,” where we can quickly and seamlessly leverage specialty labs in a lease-like manner from partners as needed, thus expediting R&D. Increasingly, as we follow the science to new experimental designs and new therapeutic technologies (CAR T-cell therapy, cancer vaccines, digital therapeutics, etc.), we are less focused on building durable, static labs. Instead, dynamically accessing elastic lab capabilities will empower our evolving R&D strategy. Our new cloud-based collaboration solutions will go a long way toward supporting virtual teamwork with providers outside our walls.
When we collaborate efficiently, it drives productivity by helping us to work faster. One of the most significant benefits of working faster at Lilly will revolve around effectively changing our workplace processes to use Teams day to day throughout the enterprise. We are conducting approximately 300 Teams pilot projects around the world within IT, research, and marketing departments. When communication channels are oriented to particular project workflows, documents are all in one place. We can add creative flows with team members around the world, opening up collaborative possibilities at Lilly. Teams also facilitates coauthoring—a significant benefit given the abundance of documentation this industry requires. Whenever we can spend less time redlining and passing around versions among people, there will be an efficiency gain in running the business.
As a technologist, I’m always seeking these opportunities for positive change in our work habits. Looking back to when we deployed Exchange Online, we migrated over 70,000 mailboxes for our employees and collaborators in less than nine months with a seamless transition—which also provided them with nearly unlimited storage to improve their work lives. I think we can generate more successes like that with Microsoft 365. We expect that Windows 10, with its ongoing updates and new capabilities, will be a case in point. Additionally, the AI capabilities that are built into Office 365, even for something as routine as automating how we schedule meetings, could be a boon to our culture.
And when it comes to regulatory compliance and security, I have believed for years that we have the opportunity to be more compliant and secure in the cloud, rather than less. The capabilities we see in the Microsoft Cloud environment are the latest confirmation of these instincts. Complying with the regulatory requirements in the life science industry is always a given at Lilly, but Microsoft 365 security features help improve how we meet data privacy and quality requirements. “Security and quality by design” is one of our IT strategy principles, and the Microsoft Cloud is clearly aligned.
A few years ago, Lilly went through a significant period of patent expiration that challenged our business like never before. Our CEO at the time inspired us to double down on innovation, and today we have a strong pipeline of new molecules to help deliver on our purpose. Our current CEO is inspiring an increased sense of teamwork, speed, and productivity. Using services within Microsoft 365 is one component of that drive and will help put us in an even better position to continue the innovation required to deliver on our promise to patients everywhere.
—Mike Meadows
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