Door: Roel Wagter
In mijn rol als copromotor en gastdocent aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen begeleid ik via de Faculteit der Natuurwetenschappen, Wiskunde en Informatica jaarlijks een aantal studenten. Na mijn college over ‘sturen op samenhang’ ontvangen de betreffende studenten de opdracht om naar keuze een jaarverslag van een onderneming te downloaden en de samenhang op zingevingsniveau van deze onderneming te onderzoeken en te waarderen. Voor alle duidelijkheid, het betreft hier tussentijdse studieresultaten in de vorm van een op te leveren paper. De komende tijd zal ik, overigens met toestemming van de betreffende studenten en de universiteit een aantal van deze papers publiceren. Dit doe ik in de hoop opdat velen deze exercitie zullen navolgen. Immers een goed niveau van samenhang is randvoorwaardelijk voor een hoog reactievermogen, hoge aanpasbaarheid en het bereiken van de beoogde performance. En het sturen op samenhang begint met het sturen op samenhang op zingevingsniveau. Te weten de samenhang tussen de missie, visie, kernwaarden, doelen en strategie. Voor een ieder die meer wil weten over ‘sturen op samenhang’ zie ons laatstelijk gepubliceerde boek.
De onderzoeksopdracht
De onderzoeksopdracht zoals omschreven in de inleiding heeft bij student Wessel Kamphuis er toe geleid de samenhang op zingevingsniveau van Microsoft te onderzoeken. In deze blog geef ik onderstaand alleen het abstract en de intro van zijn paper weer en verwijs graag naar de versie van het volledige paper.
Abstract
A search towards Microsoft’s Enterprise Coherence
These days, enterprises rely for a large part on the use of technology and IT, and one could say that information systems are embedded in almost every enterprise. The ever changing dynamics of the business environment, influenced by globalisation, technology development and changing business models, requires enterprises to find new ways to govern their organization. A company that makes it possible for enterprises to be more productive in the digital spheres, by e.g. producing CRM ERP systems, operating systems and other digital business tools, is Microsoft. Founded in 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen had a vision that was about to change the world. After Microsoft had been approached by IBM to create a new operating system, the Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) was born. In that time DOS was still regarded as alien to a lot of consumers. This lead to the creation of something more simple in 1985, Windows 1.0, Microsoft’s first graphical user interface. Instead of typing commands, consumers could navigate by using a mouse. On March 13 1986, Microsoft’s stock went public, and from this point on Microsoft continued to evolve. As of this day, Microsoft is the largest software maker, consumers have great utility for software and Microsoft is not just a software maker anymore. Under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft reached a revenue of $125 billion last year. Its profit margin of 29% is larger than either Apple of Alphabet [McFarlane, 2020]. In the years after Nadella took over in 2014, Microsoft shifted towards services and cloud computing, which now accounts for nearly one third of the company’soverall revenue.
Research problem
After reading different online articles one can get an understanding, of how Microsoft evolved into becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world. Its products and services vary in a wide range of different software products, services, devices and solutions which should make life easier for consumers and businesses. These articles provide sufficient information from an external viewpoint, but how well is Microsoft managing when looking at different attributes with an internal perspective? In other words, how can the enterprise coherence of Microsoft be perceived, when analyzing different attributes of the company? Significant contribution to the literature on enterprise coherence stems from the General Enterprise Architecture (GEA) enterprise coherence framework (ECF). In particular, ECF provides a useful framework in making the coherence of an enterprise explicit [Wagter, R. et al., 2013]. In doing so, it makes to coherence explicit on both the level of purpose and the level of design and the relation between these levels. Due to the scope of this paper, the focus will be only on the level of purpose. Elements of the level of purpose are commonly known business elements, which can be derived from an annual report [Microsoft, 2019]. Elements one can think of are an enterprise’s: mission, vision, core values, goals and strategies. After the elements are made explicit, the next step is measuring the level of purpose [Bekel and Wagter, 2020]. Methods for quantification of enterprise coherence will be further explained in the 4 literature section. When the level of purpose of Microsoft is quantified, a grade can be given to the quality of the coherence at level of purpose. Since, at first sight there are not any articles present on the coherence at level of purpose of Microsoft in the existing literature, this paper will give a first attempt to do so. The aim of this paper is to make the enterprise coherence at level of purpose explicit according to the data of the Microsoft 2019 annual report. With regards to the research question, it is stated as follows: ”How can the enterprise coherence of Microsoft be perceived when looking at the level of purpose?” In the following section the accommodating literature will be described, which is at the foundation of this paper.