It is believed that crisis brings out the best in men and women and this applies to those playing leadership roles in large transnational corporations like Microsoft. The CEO of this software major, Satya Nadella has addressed all employees in the company via an email. Obviously, the subject of the communication is the COVID-19 virus and how Microsoft is trying to play its responsible role in the situation.
He has shared the mail on his LinkedIn page.
Nadella starts off by confirming that he and the top team in the company are fully concerned about the employees’ well-being and safety of their families. He says in the regular meeting at the headquarters, the discussion is around how the company can support the employees during these tough times.
Nadella has tried to relate to all his employees at a personal level by referring to how the employees are learning to adapt to the new normal of working from home and how he himself is learning with his two teenage daughters to do their lessons from their home, online. He admits it’s a challenge.
He has then gone on to remind the Microsoft employees of how the company’s many technological solutions are being deployed in the COVID-19 containment and control exercises, while emphasising the role software plays as a tool in different ways in creating, storing and analysing data related to the COVID-19 crisis.
He mentions that in healthcare, MS technology is being used for telemedicine, enabling user-intuitive solutions to share data and access critical information. Nadella refers to St. Luke’s University Health Network in Pennsylvania which is using Teams to video chat with patients most vulnerable to COVID-19.
“The newly released Power Platform template helps customers share information and collaborate during a crisis, and it has already been installed by more than 2,000 customers around the world. Swedish Hospital and other local hospitals in Seattle are using Power Apps and Power BI to manage their bed count and inventory of critical supplies and share that information with others across the region. Johns Hopkins University has created an interactive dashboard to visualise and track COVID-19 cases in real time. All the data collected is available via a GitHub repository, and the solution is hosted by Microsoft’s partner Esri’s ArcGIS mapping and analysis software, on Azure”, he says.
Another instance he refers to is how the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is using an assessment tool built on a healthcare bot developed by Microsoft. This bot is helping doctors across Europe as well. Microsoft 365 is being deployed by governments in many countries like Italy, Kuwait, Japan, Norway, Spain and Sweden to keep their citizens informed. The remote learning tools for many educational institutions are being provided through Teams. Nadella says even in the cybersecurity area, the AI and human intelligence capabilities at the company has helped ward off attacks related to the COVID-19 supply chain systems.
According to the Microsoft CEO, the company is playing a role in the research being carried out in finding a solution to the pandemic. Microsoft has a partnership with Adaptive Technologies which is involved in mapping the immune system’s response to COVID-19 and the data will be made freely accessible so that those working on finding treatment solutions can be benefitted.