This is what Delve looks like today, but coming soon (within the next six months), is an update to Delve that moves the service from being a personalised view of corporate documents, into a very useful analytics tool.
Using the Office Graph (much like the Facebook Graph), the Office team is going to surface information to business that we’ve never really had access to before.
Below is a photo of an unreleased component of Delve that’s currently in development. The Dashboard will provide office analytics like how long you spend in meetings vs people in similar positions in your organisations.
There’s also a team work map that shows not just an Active Directory corporate structure, but the connections you have with co-workers and project groups or teams, regardless of which area of the business they’re from.
The thickness of the lines between people indicates the strength of the connection and Microsoft hopes this intelligence will lead to an understanding of when teams, and people who aren’t working together when they really should be.
Check out this graph of an demo users’ meeting time breakdown. First off the Dashboard shows the employee is spending 60% of business hours in meetings, which leverages your Outlook calendar, the good thing is this doesn’t just look at the hours of 9-5 as modern business doesn’t operate in that time slot alone.
When you tap on that data, you find out that 60% of time is actually 12% more than company average by charting this over a number of months, you can see something in the business changed to cause a spike for this employee. Maybe the person next to them left and they picked up extra work or maybe they had extra responsibility added to their role.
Whatever the reason, the data clearly highlights this in an easy to read way, something that’s not only useful for the employee to know, but great for their manager to know when it comes to staffing the role adequately.
Another view shows the Work / life balance for an employee. Again picking up the meetings in their calendar that can and do happen all hours of the day. Right now it’s 8:27PM, so my work doesn’t fall into a standard day and I can appreciate taking calls / meetings at crazy hours.
With employee retention being a such a critical component of competitive business, it’s imperative that companies stay on top of over ambitious employees as much as under achieving ones.
Having this data displayed as simply as this has never been available to business before without an expensive custom solution, or just not at all.
These Office Delve Analytics for business will allow business to be alerted to problems inside their organisations more than ever before. With the right information, managers should be able to proactively resolve problems before they become larger problems.
It’s always hard to know what the utilisation of a new service will be inside enterprise, but if used correctly, this has big possibilities and is like PowerBI, but handed to you on a platter. It will also change how people see Delve and its role inside organisations.
One to watch.
