Microsoft’s Digital Transformation: A Vision for the Future
The Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE) team is at the forefront of Microsoft’s internal digital transformation. This initiative focuses on rethinking traditional IT and business operations to boost innovation and productivity for over 220,000 employees worldwide. The goal is to empower employees, strengthen customer and partner engagement, streamline operations, and transform products.
The Need for Transformation
The need for this transformation is apparent, especially given the challenges brought on by the global pandemic. Disruptions in employee placement, supply chain management, and retail operations have highlighted the importance of digital agility. Microsoft’s investment in digital transformation has allowed a quicker and more effective response to the rapid changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
By continuing this digital transformation, Microsoft aims to further its mission of empowering every person and organization to achieve more, starting within the company through MDEE. Every challenge offers an opportunity to improve Microsoft’s ability to meet new challenges and remain a leader.
Leading with Vision and Execution
Vision is the driving force behind the digital transformation. MDEE powers the company, making it crucial for internal and external customers. Leadership requires a clear understanding of the desired outcomes and the steps needed to achieve them. By aligning work with a broader vision, the team moves beyond routine tasks to deliver exceptional results for Microsoft. Each MDEE group has a specific vision based on the needs of its customers and the organization.
However, articulating the vision is just the start. The vision must accurately reflect the work being done. It is the foundation for major decisions, not a document to be filed away. A strong link between vision and work is achieved by telling a clear narrative that guides daily decisions. Every choice must connect to the broader vision and inspire the business’s aspirations and energize employees.
Telling the story this way ensures that all work contributes to the wider goals and supports the various audiences involved, which is critical for securing their support and collaboration. This approach also equips stakeholders to share the success story of how the team’s work benefits them.
Making Strategic Choices
Being vision-led means making tough choices about resource allocation, determining what efforts to prioritize and what to postpone or forgo. The team prioritizes ruthlessly, focusing on what deserves future investment and what should be stopped. They set a high bar for quality, delivery, cost, and compliance. The approach includes adhering to guidelines that inform operations.
- Connecting outcomes to the vision and prioritizing clearly.
- Placing user experiences at the center of designs.
- Building role-specific expertise and depth.
- Investing in core platforms and systems to improve engineering productivity.
- Using data and insights to continually evaluate and prioritize the approach, ensuring alignment with the vision.
With this mindset, employees are encouraged to think strategically and continuously consider the impact on customer experience and how to improve it.
Establishing Transformation Priorities
As part of the Microsoft Digital Product Vision, MDEE established critical priorities to structure its areas of work. These priorities are based on existing challenges within MDEE and on best-in-class practices from other organizations. These priorities continually guide work and function as an organizational tool for measuring the progress
1. Cloud-centric Architecture: This architecture aims to deliver a consistently high level of service reliability. Cloud systems are designed for agility, resilience, cost-effectiveness, and scalability, enhancing innovation. Microsoft Azure forms the core of this architecture, automating processes, unifying tools, and boosting engineering productivity.
- Transitioning from on-premises to cloud offerings for dynamic compute, geo-redundancy, a unified data strategy (Azure Data lake), and software-defined infrastructures.
- Moving to cloud-centered IT operations, including provisioning, patching, monitoring, and backups using Azure-based offerings.
- Enabling company growth while maintaining flat running costs for cloud services.
- Developing deeper insights into service reliability through standardization of monitoring solutions via Azure Application Insights and standardization of incident-management tooling and automatic alerting.
2. Secure Enterprise: Security is a comprehensive and constantly evolving pursuit that requires the same focus on innovation and improvement as every tech industry aspect. Cloud-based architecture and ubiquitous user access require an enterprise security strategy that uses identity as the new perimeter and encompasses the entire digital footprint. This improved security is seamlessly integrated into all parts of digital transformation.
- Using Zero Trust to protect infrastructure using enforced device health, strong authentication, least-privileged access, and telemetry verifying control effectiveness.
- Eliminating passwords with robust multi-factor authentication.
- Thwarting phishing attacks to users via Microsoft Office 365 safe filters and Safe links, phishing detection, along with email delivery prevention.
- Making the Security Operations Center more efficient and effective via automation and orchestration of detection and response.
3. Data and Intelligence: In modern organizations, data is the most crucial asset. The rise of data, advanced algorithms, and computing power allows modern organizations to make rapid advancements in technology and business disruptions. Turning disparate company data into cohesive insights and intelligence is critical.
- Creating a modern data foundation by aggregating clean, connected, and authoritative data that’s catalogued and easily discoverable in a common location.
- Developing AI and machine learning to augment and accelerate expert decision-making using data from the available data.
- Using analytics services to understand user journeys, monitor processes, and gather insights, which are used for executive scorecards and measuring progress toward strategic goals.
4. Customer Centricity: Microsoft employees and customers must remain a core focus, experiencing “One Microsoft” across different channels. A strong foundation of customer data is essential for digital transformation.
- Developing customer health-analytics and recommendation engines using clean, historical customer data to anticipate needs, improve offerings, and add value.
- Publishing a shared, reliable directory of organizational data with clear tools and processes to ensure accuracy.
- Augmenting organizational data to maintain relationships, leading to a complete account of who the customer is and how they can be best served.
5. Productive Enterprise: Enabling Microsoft employees to achieve more is at the heart of their mission. Employees must be empowered to be creative and productive by Microsoft 365, AI, and machine learning to provide interconnected, accessible, interactive, and unique employee experiences.
- Supporting various devices, from the start, ensuring they are always updated with secure and easy access to any work-related app, site, service, document, and necessary data.
- Developing enterprise search and task-automation capabilities that use Microsoft Search and integrated digital assistants.
- Enabling team productivity using Microsoft Teams with Office 365, which boosts engagement and accelerates decision-making on every device in any location.
- Creating a modern workplace in which employees have integrated digital and physical experiences for meeting space organization and other workplace services such as parking and transportation.
- Providing a customizable web and mobile employee experience focused on the individual, giving personalized access to workplace services and simplifying common tasks.
Transforming How Work Gets Done
Changes in how the team works are essential to enable transformation. These changes allow for increased ownership, greater efficiency, and durable construction. Implementing a model gives them the ability to shift from team budget-based decisions toward business outcome-focused deliveries instead.
- Centralizing funding and prioritization allows MDEE to control the budget, shifting away from a decentralized, department-focused funding model.
- Insourcing core systems and engineering keeps the most crucial systems under the control of full-time employees, preserving intellectual property.
- Focusing metrics on business outcomes aligns success measures with business outcomes rather than IT operating metrics.
Product-Based Approach to Business
To allow world-class service execution, Microsoft has adopted a product-based approach. The team strives to develop solutions that contribute to the vision using agile development and product-focused management.
- Creating a vision- and business-driven agenda that ensures all resource investments align with the vision.
- Adopting a DevOps structure that extends the management lifecycle and gives team members ownership over every line of code they write.
- Shifting to product management keeps teams focused on product success rather than project completion.
Modern Engineering Practices
Modern engineering centers on providing standard tools and automation that enable continuous integration and delivery practices. A unified set of standards protects and enables employees.
- Establishing a coherent design system creates a consistent experience across all products and solutions.
- Creating integrated and connected services using a microservice architecture that promotes code reuse and cross-service dependencies through APIs.
- Building privacy, security, and accessibility standards directly into workflow.
- Applying standards organization-wide, fostering trust in engineering practices.
Customer Zero Feedback Loop
MDEE is an early adopter of Microsoft solutions, which gives them the unique opportunity to share best practices and lessons learned. Many product enhancements start internally and evolve through a feedback cycle before being integrated into the final product.
The Journey Continues
Microsoft’s transformation is ongoing, and the team is committed to learning and adapting its strategies. The goal is to inspire and guide customers through their own transformation journeys by sharing their experiences.
