Microsoft memo: 'New world of work'

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a new set of challenges: finding information, visualizing and understanding it, and taking action. Industry analysts estimate that information workers spend up to 30 percent of their working day just looking for data they need. All the time people spend tracking down information, managing and organizing documents, and making sure their teams have the data they need, could be much better spent on analysis, collaboration, insight and other work that adds value.

At Microsoft, we believe that the key to helping businesses become more agile and productive in the global economy is to empower individual workers--giving them tools that improve efficiency and enable them to focus on the highest-value work. And a new generation of software is an important ingredient in making this happen.

How we will work
Over the next decade, we see a tremendous opportunity to help companies of all sizes maximize the impact of employees and workgroups, drive deeper connections with customers and partners, enable informed and timely decision-making, and manage and protect critical information.

The next generation of information-worker applications will build on promising technologies--such as machine learning, rich metadata for data and objects, new services-based standards for collaboration, advances in computing and display hardware, and self-administering, self-configuring applications--transforming them into software that will truly enhance the way people work --

Improving personal productivity: One consequence of an "always-on" environment is the challenge of prioritizing, focusing and working without interruption. Today's software can handle some of this, but hardly at a level that matches the judgment and awareness of a human being. That will change--new software will learn from the way you work, understand your needs, and help you set priorities.

Pattern recognition and adaptive filtering: Rules and learned behavior will soon be able to automate many routine tasks. Software will be able to make inferences about what you're working on and deliver the information you need in an integrated and proactive way. As software learns your working preferences, it can flexibly manage your interruptions--if you're working on a high-priority memo under a tight deadline, for example, software should be able to understand this and only allow phone calls or e-mails from, say, your manager or a family member.

Unified communication: Integrated communication will provide a single "point of entry" to the networked world that is consistent across applications and devices. People should have a unified, complete view of their communication options, whether by voice or text, real-time or offline, with ready access to tools like speech-to-text and machine translation. You should be able to listen to your email, or read your voicemail. Project notifications, meetings, business applications, contacts and schedules should be accessible within a single consistent view, whether you're at your desk, down the hall, on the road or working at home.

Presence: We're just beginning to tap the potential of presence information to help information and notifications flow where they're needed and better enable ad-hoc collaboration to solve problems and get things done. Presence information connects people and their schedules to documents and workflow, keeping you close to the changing data and expert insight that is relevant to what you're doing.

Team collaboration: Over the next decade, shared workspaces will become far more robust, with richer tools to automate workflow and connect all the people, data and resources it takes to get things done. They will capture live data and documents in ways that will benefit