Microsoft Product Fair Insights

I wanted to share some interesting observations from a recent internal product fair on the Microsoft campus. Product fair was a chance for the product teams at Microsoft to showcase the latest and greatest to the rest of the company. We’re not just talking Office and Vista here… we’re talking everything from Zune to Forefront Systems management. There was 16 tents that featured over 100 products, they even had popcorn and snowcones to munch on while getting the down low on the latest bits and bytes. I could go on talking about the enormity of the product fair but I’ll get to the point of this post, which is around PerformancePoint and organizational needs for performance management. With over 70,000 employees Microsoft is a pretty good example of a large enterprise with complexity and overlap, you name it they got it. While speaking with colleagues from different parts of the organization about the plans for PerformancePoint, I was surprised to learn about all the various BI/performance management projects occurring internally within Microsoft. Across, IT, HR, operations, and finance I had a constant line of people wanting to discuss new features of Microsoft’s performance management solution and how it could help their teams internally monitor and analyze their business. Very neat to see a strong “eat your own dogfood” mentality, brings me back to the Crystal Decisions days where it was like the Seinfeld soup Nazi, Crystal Reports or no soup for you! This experience really opened my eyes to the power of bringing BI to the masses, in a span of 3 hours nearly 60 people came up and asked me an internally focused performance management question about how they could better track and understand their particular business. Needless to say, this performance guy was pumped, it’s nice to have some real world validation from time to time.