LEO roars back into IT fashion

I was recently invited to Microsoft’s Redmond HQ to meet an assortment of product, research and marketing people talking about topics as diverse as home automation, product usability, social networking and, of course, the latest versions of its software.

Although it was fascinating to see Microsoft in its native habitat, there were no earth-shattering revelations. But what struck me during one of the last presentations – about Office as a business platform – was that things have come in an enormous circle over the past 56 years since the very first electronic office application ran.

That application (known as “Bakery Valuations”) ran on the Lyons Electronic Office computer (LEO) in 1951, and its task was running the bakery production logistics for the daily orders received from J Lyons’ famous chain of tea shops.

The driving force behind the development of LEO was manager John Simmons’ desire to automate much of the mind-numbing pen-pushing that was performed daily by his massive clerical team. Perhaps oddly to our modern minds, the chief goal wasn’t cutting costs; according to Georgina Ferry’s excellent book A Computer called LEO, Simmons viewed routine clerical work as “a waste of human intelligence”.

As LEO was developed, it became clear that it was adaptable enough to be attractive to other companies, and eventually LEO became a commercial success.

LEO was an integrated business platform, not only running the actual manufacturing logistics, but offering what we’d now call BI, CRM and ERP capabilities. Coming back to my Microsoft visit, that’s just how the software giant sees its Office suite.

Gone are the days when Office was just a collection of handy applications for writing contracts and calculating sales charts. Thanks to technologies like SharePoint and XML, you can now run your entire business on Office, according to the Redmond whizz kids. The alleged benefits are increased productivity, higher efficiency and more profit, just as John Simmons wished. For example, updating an interest rate in an Excel spreadsheet can be instantly passed on to update any other application that utilises that figure, with no need for the clerical drudgery of manually finding and updating everything.

And now I come to think of it, the Microsoft Electronic Office, or MEO, does have a sort of attractively retro ring to it...