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Responsible Use of Technology: The Microsoft Case Study

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The World Economic Forum Responsible Use of Technology project aims to provide practical resources for organizations to operationalize ethics in technology. This White Paper, with its focus on Microsoft Corporation, highlights tools and processes that facilitate responsible technology product design and development. The document is the first in a series that seeks to investigate how companies have begun to incorporate ethical thinking into the development of technology. Its lessons can help organizations advance their own responsible innovation practices, and may even inspire others that have created new methods in pursuit of ethical technology to share their work, either in this series or elsewhere.

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Home / Case Studies / Avanade

Microsoft Viva Topics simplifies knowledge sharing at Avanade

Published on November 3, 2021

Avanade is a leading provider of innovative digital and cloud-enabled services, business solutions, and design-led experiences, and it relies heavily on the power of people. Avanade believes in taking advantage of the knowledge and experiences held by each individual to build and provide the best offerings and services for its customers. Because of this, sharing expertise, project or deliverable examples, templates, and other knowledge among one another is key to the company’s success and the success of the businesses it serves. Looking for a solution that would enable Avanade employees to quickly find the exact expert, example or template required to provide businesses with the right digital offerings, Avanade deployed Microsoft Viva Topics.

As an organization whose services are built on and around Microsoft technologies, Avanade’s workforce of 50,000 professionals are experienced, heavy users of collaboration solutions like Yammer and Microsoft Teams. But even with top-notch approaches to collaboration, finding the right people, the best examples of deliverables, or the best templates often required some digging and building what some employees refer to as a “chain of experts.” Many knowledge experts are familiar with this concept, in which an employee starts a conversation with one expert and is then handed off down a chain of people until the correct team member is identified.

As requests for innovative digital workplace solutions surged, Avanade employees wanted a solution that eliminated the need for extensive email threads or cumbersome searches and aligned with their “Teams as the experience platform” approach. They wanted a solution to quickly provide businesses with the right digital offerings and remove the need to sift through emails, Yammer communities, or Teams sites and chats to find the exact expert, example, or template they required.

Microsoft launched a preview program in January 2020, which was limited to approximately 60 customers around the globe, to test out and provide feedback on powerful new AI-driven knowledge solutions prior to their release. As program participants, Avanade team members were able to attend product demonstrations, get exclusive updates to the roadmap, test products as they were developed and provide feedback, and give key insights on how they felt the solutions would be best utilized.

In testing the capabilities of Microsoft Viva Topics, which uses AI to automatically reason over an organization’s data and then identify, process, and organize it to make knowledge easier to discover and use, Avanade found the tool it needed to help reduce its discovery challenges. “The value of Viva Topics is really about placing information that people need in the places they’re hanging out,” says Marci Jenkins, Workplace IT Executive at Avanade.

Unlike most organizations where new technologies are gradually rolled out from one department to another, Avanade chose to offer Viva Topics to the entire company, enabling all employees to contribute to the curation around topics. “The power of Viva Topics is in bringing together AI and the smartness and experience of our people,” says Jenkins. Crawling the documents in SharePoint, Viva Topics has begun identifying thousands of topics across the company’s Microsoft tenant, including Avanade offerings, Microsoft solutions, industries, customers, and even strategic initiatives.

The value of Viva Topics is really about placing information that people need in the places they’re hanging out…. It’s a way for the user to learn and start to explore in the moment—the moment that matters.

Rather than broadcasting pleas for help on a Yammer site or initiating a chain of experts through Outlook, employees can search in SharePoint or see topics they’re interested in highlighted on the SharePoint page they’re already viewing. And they can quickly find experts or assets for their projects or subject areas without being bombarded with pages of search results.

“I’ve started going to SharePoint and searching on some of the questions that I have or the type of asset that I’m looking for across the organization, and it’s really cool to see what pops up in my search results,” says Hannemann. “Not only is the topic page suggested to me if there’s a match, but it will also present different documents and highlight the presence of the keyword that I’m searching for.”

Over the next few years, Avanade looks forward to the generation of topics for the more than 600 customers it’s worked with. Each will highlight the key account team members as experts and document successful proofs of concept as tagged content, which will further help the company provide the best offerings and services to its customers.

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Team-Building Strategies: Building a Winning Team for Your Organization

Discover how to build a winning team and boost your business negotiation results in this free special report, Team Building Strategies for Your Organization, from Harvard Law School.

• A Top International Negotiation Case Study in Business: The Microsoft-Nokia Deal

International negotiation topics in business: merging two distinct corporate cultures with as little conflict as possible

By PON Staff — on May 2nd, 2024 / International Negotiation

We sometimes require counterparts to meet certain conditions before agreeing to enter into talks. Negotiating conditions to your participation in dealmaking can be a powerful move, but it also carries some risks that need to be carefully considered. And international negotiation brings on more challenges than most. 

Let’s look at the international negotiation case study of Microsoft’s decision to purchase Finnish mobile phone company Nokia’s mobile device business for $9.5 billion. The deal, which closed in 2014, quickly proved disastrous: Microsoft wrote off nearly all of the deal’s value and laid off thousands of workers in July 2015. Although there were many reasons the deal was a bad bet for Microsoft, a negotiating condition that Nokia set before agreeing to take part in serious negotiations may have offered one warning sign. 

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International Negotiation Behind the Microsoft and Nokia Deal: Nokia Builds Its BATNA

Microsoft and Nokia had been partners since 2011, when the Finnish firm began installing Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system (OS) on its smartphones. But Nokia lagged far behind smartphone competitors in innovation and market share, and the Windows Phone OS, used primarily on Nokia handsets, was failing to meet expectations.

In January 2013, Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer called Risto Siilasmaa, the chairman of Nokia’s board of directors, to raise the possibility of Microsoft buying divisions of Nokia. Soon after, the two men discussed the idea at a conference in Spain. They agreed inefficiencies existed in their agreement and brainstormed solutions, from minor tweaks to business mergers, reports Ina Fried on the technology news website AllThingsD.com . 

Nokia considered letting its deal with Microsoft lapse and trying to revive its handset business by adapting its smartphones to Google’s Android system. By cultivating this strong BATNA , or best alternative to a negotiated agreement, Nokia gained the power to walk away from a subpar offer from Microsoft.

Indeed, after hearing Microsoft’s first formal pitch for an acquisition in New York, Siilasmaa informed Ballmer that they were too far apart on price and other issues, such as which company would own Here, Nokia’s mapping service. Nokia executives believed they needed to hold on to their ability to sell Here to other companies. Meanwhile, Microsoft felt it couldn’t keep pace with competitors without controlling the mapping technology it was using in its phones, tablets, and PCs, and on the web, according to AllThingsD.com. Subsequent meetings between the parties in London and Finland went nowhere .  

A Deal Takes Shape

A breakthrough came when Nokia informed Microsoft that it would proceed with formal talks only if Microsoft agreed to abide by certain negotiating conditions , most notably a commitment to set up a financing source for Nokia and the caveat that Here was off the table. 

Microsoft agreed. At a meeting in New York, the parties happened upon a solution to the question of who would control the mapping service. Why not share the code, with Nokia retaining intellectual-property rights to Here? Nokia realized it could grant Microsoft a license to access and customize Here’s source code and own any improvements it made. Nokia would retain ownership of Here and the power to license the service to other companies. Ballmer and Siilasmaa shook hands on the outlines of an agreement, which was filled out over the next two months. 

The Risks of Setting Negotiating Conditions

A negotiating condition is an “if” statement—such as, “If you agree to take this issue off the table, I’ll negotiate”—that qualifies your entry into a negotiation or acceptance of a deal. Setting negotiating conditions can be a particularly useful tool when it comes to improving the appeal of another party’s onerous request or demand, notes Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School professor Guhan Subramanian

But insisting that the other party agree to certain terms as a precondition to negotiation can be risky. In their 2012 labor dispute, for example, the musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra said for many months that they would negotiate with the orchestra’s management only after a lockout ended. But management was loath to accept this negotiating condition , aware that the players would have little motivation to accept significant salary cuts if they were performing and being paid. 

Before stipulating a negotiating condition , remember that your counterpart will weigh the costs and benefits of accepting your negotiating conditions against their alternatives away from the table. If you have a strong BATNA , as Nokia appeared to, then it may make sense to take this risk. But note that even in this case, Microsoft made inroads on the mapping service issue that Nokia had claimed was nonnegotiable. Microsoft may have salvaged the deal by refusing to assume that Nokia’s negotiating conditions were nonnegotiable—a move Microsoft’s leaders likely later came to regret.

Two key lessons on negotiating terms and conditions emerge from these failed negotiation examples . First, you should demand only those conditions that are truly deal breakers for you. Second, try to craft negotiating conditions in ways that provide benefits or concessions to your counterpart. Even when you have the power to get what you want, your efforts to help your counterparts get what they want will pay off in the form of stronger relationships and longer-lasting deals.

Have you had experience negotiating conditions to a deal within an international negotiation? If so, how did the process work out?

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No Responses to “A Top International Negotiation Case Study in Business: The Microsoft-Nokia Deal”

3 responses to “a top international negotiation case study in business: the microsoft-nokia deal”.

There are no more phones with ‘Nokia Lumia’. They are all ‘Microsoft Lumia’. Microsoft completely scraped the company and rebranded the devices. Nokia got a bad future

There has been a completely mixed response to whether the deal was good or was a decision taken in a hurry. Nokia surely can use this incoming cash flow on some great products, but the issue now is that Nokia was recognized by its Mobile Devices and there will be almost zero difference between a new product category (coz no more mobile phones)coming under the NOKIA brand name or a completely new Brand name because they will both have zero popularity in that field.

It would probably be good for Nokia to come up with a new brand name and leave the Nokia legacy behind in its Nokia Research Department and nowhere else. As you could feel, this deal saddens me 🙁

It’s 2015 now buddy and Nokia’s all of microsoft now. You should be a lot sad now 😛

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Understanding how to arrange the meeting space is a key aspect of preparing for negotiation. In this video, Professor Guhan Subramanian discusses a real world example of how seating arrangements can influence a negotiator’s success. This discussion was held at the 3 day executive education workshop for senior executives at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Guhan Subramanian is the Professor of Law and Business at the Harvard Law School and Professor of Business Law at the Harvard Business School.

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May 16, 2024

Create accessible PDFs with Microsoft 365 apps

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Howdy, Microsoft 365 insiders! My name is Peter Wu, and I’m a Principal Engineer on the PowerPoint team. I’m here to explain how to use several Microsoft 365 apps to create accessible PDFs, so that everyone can access and enjoy the content of your creations.

Create accessible PDFs with Microsoft 365

Global Accessibility Awareness Day occurs every May, and this year we’re reminding you to make sure that your documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and other content remains accessible by the more than 1 billion people in the world with disabilities.

Many people who you communicate with could have disabilities that you are not aware of (studies show more than 70% of disabilities are invisible). Making your content accessible can help empower them to understand your message and fully participate in whatever activity or concept you are communicating. Practice and make it a habit ! 

We know many of you distribute your content in PDF format, which is why we’ve been continually making improvements to the way Microsoft 365 apps preserve the accessibility of content when exporting to PDF. In most cases, you can do all your accessibility work within your favorite Microsoft 365 apps, without costly add-ins or other remediation steps.

How it works

• Start with a template or theme that has good semantics and color palette, such as the new default theme in Office . All six of the accent colors in this theme contrast well with the default text color and font size in PowerPoint, and three of the six accent colors contrast well when using smaller font sizes.
• By default, the Accessibility Checker runs while you work. A notification is displayed in the Status Bar. If any accessibility issues are detected, simply click the notification to open the Accessibility Assistant pane and review the list of issues found.

• In  PowerPoint , Excel , and Outlook for Windows , after you have the Accessibility Checker open, the Accessibility ribbon tab also appears at the top of the window providing the tools that help you make your content accessible all in one place. 
• Beta Channel users can also access a preview of the new Accessibility Assistant in Word and Outlook for Windows by selecting Review > Check Accessibility . This tool makes it even easier to create accessible documents in those apps.
• Tip: Don’t use Print as PDF , since that command doesn’t produce an accessible PDF.
• If there are accessibility issues in the content, a notification appears when saving or exporting it as a PDF in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Windows, reminding you to make it accessible.

PDF accessibility improvements in Microsoft 365  

Recent improvements to PDF accessibility in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint include:

• Exporting accessible PDF on iOS and Mac (when using the Best for electronic distribution and accessibility option) in Excel as well as Word. This feature is also available in PowerPoint to all Current Channel (Preview) users.
• Bookmarks for sections and slides in PowerPoint and headings or bookmarks in Word to help people more easily navigate PDF content.
• Over 100 improvements to PDF/UA tags, which provide essential information for people who rely on a screen reader to read and understand PDF content.
• The most suitable tags for Shapes with text, Alt Text, and Equations
• <Formula> with Alt Text for Equations in Excel and PowerPoint
• <Figure> with Alt Text for every other type of graphical object
• Flat <Figure> (no nesting) for SmartArts and Groups in PowerPoint
• WordArt preserved as text
• Hyperlinks aren’t nested in <Figure> in PowerPoint
• Artifact and no tags for Decorative objects, objects on slide master, headers, footers, cell borders, and more
• Removed unnecessary <Span> and <P> tags
• <Span> tags for different languages and no Actual Text
• <THead> and <TH> for table headers
• Merged table cells have rowspan and colspan in PowerPoint
• Lists have proper nesting and <Lbl> for the bullet
• Footnote and Endnote <Link>s
• <BlockQuote> for Word Paragraph Quote and Intense Quote styles
• <Quote> for Word Quote style
• <Title> for Word Title style
• Heading levels beyond <H6>

Availability

These features are generally available in the latest releases of Microsoft 365, except where noted above. Availability may vary by product. 

We want to hear from you! Please click Help  >  Feedback in any Microsoft 365 product to submit your thoughts about a PDF accessibility feature. 

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