Imagine an important meeting where you spend most of your time discussing the accuracy of metrics and reports. Too often, that was the reality for many Microsoft teams before we launched Microsoft Sales Experience (MSX) Insights, a Microsoft business intelligence platform.
Now MSX Insights provides a single source of truth to more than 40,000 users, including salespeople, their managers, leaders, and multiple operations and finance teams across Microsoft. Based on Microsoft Fabric, a suite of Microsoft Azure technologies that includes OneLake, Data Factory, Synapse, Azure Analysis Services, and Power BI, MSX Insights is a project of the Microsoft Commerce and Ecosystem team, which powers, transforms, and protects our organization.
“Once we began using Azure and then Power BI, the technology limitations that had been holding back our data unification were eliminated,” says one of the project sponsors, Michael Toomey, senior director of business operations and programs for Microsoft Worldwide Sales Engineering. “Was it finally possible to get to a single view of our commercial business that everyone could understand?”
That’s exactly what happened when Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS), Microsoft Finance and Data Experiences, and Customer Experience Data Engineering (CX Data) collaborated to create today’s comprehensive Microsoft business intelligence platform: MSX Insights.
[See how we automated our legacy revenue processing systems with optical character recognition (OCR) technology. Find out how we reinvented sales processing and financial reporting with Azure.]
Reports and metrics that didn’t add up
At Microsoft, it’s critical that decision makers have access to data they can trust across the sales pipeline, contracts, revenue, and consumption. But when they pulled reports from separate systems or used data updated at different times, the numbers and results often didn’t match.
“We used to have a lot of complaints,” says RJ Smith, principal group engineering manager with Microsoft Commercial Business. “I talked to people in Paris, Munich, Sydney, and they said that those reports wouldn’t load or that they didn’t show the right data.”
Praveen Vittalrao Ambekar, a principal group program manager for CX Data, also analyzed the MSX customer experience to find out what was driving the support volume.
We needed a 360-degree view of our customer to correctly evaluate key metrics. We wanted end-to-end visibility.
– Michael Toomey, senior director of business operations and programs, Microsoft Worldwide Sales Engineering
“Multiple data platforms powered these reports,” Ambekar says. “The insights weren’t aligned across sellers, managers, and leaders, and that was causing a lot of churn for the team. The groups were looking at the data from different angles.”
Those weren’t the only problems. The scope of the available reports didn’t fulfill the needs of senior executives.
“We needed a 360-degree view of our customer to correctly evaluate key metrics,” Toomey says. “We wanted end-to-end visibility.”
Although we empower our teams extensively to develop their own reporting platforms, we were seeing broad duplications of effort and cost. “It was a highly federated budget model,” Toomey says.
It was also risky. As people developed one-off solutions using copies of datasets, it became harder to secure the information and enforce compliance with standard data-handling practices.
“The more replication you have, the less likelihood that everyone’s compliant with the rules,” Ambekar says.
The insular systems also impacted engagement and satisfaction levels for our partners and customers.
“Close coordination across sales teams, partners, marketing, and operations is critical for our customers to get a connected experience,” Toomey says. “It’s impossible to achieve that if we have multiple datasets with mismatched data on opportunities, consumption, licenses, revenue, and other kinds of information.”
Multiple waves of data handling improvements
After we began using a standardized system, teams could migrate from competing products and use the same software regardless of department. The solution has stood the test of time.
“Power BI as a product is almost 12 years old and so is our platform,” Toomey says. “It has successfully adapted through the transitions of Microsoft’s core business model and the priorities of multiple engineering leaders—and our commercial business as a whole. We always need a central place to go and get insights.”
Then we launched Microsoft Azure cloud computing services, making it easier for users in different departments to access the same source of data.
“We started to take the approach of giving people what they needed based on their roles,” Toomey says.
That might be a seller who wants to see their scorecard broken down by account, a manager who needs an aggregate of the entire team’s pipeline, or a leader looking for patterns and trends over time. Microsoft Azure was a major enabler for this new direction, and Microsoft Power BI was the team’s choice of a front end for the evolving business intelligence platform.
“We had a quarterly business connection, an event where we bring all the executives together, area by area, segment by segment,” Toomey says. “Several of us got together and worked for six weeks to automate the data handling. We moved everything into Power BI and ran visuals there.”
That proof of concept was a success, so the next step was to make a cultural shift to get to an aligned environment. To that end, the team built a community around Microsoft Power BI practitioners in the field. This BI round table community gets together a few times a month to share best practices, what they’re doing locally, and what has the potential to scale up.
“We tried to connect with the people building the tools and explain that this was a better way for them to be successful,” Toomey says.
The team also focused on increasing the tool’s speed for users around the world.
“It’s not a problem anymore,” Smith says. “In fact, performance metrics have improved 50 percent. We spent a lot of time on performance to make sure the JavaScript implementation in the browser works well.”
In November 2020, representatives from the teams who were most involved in creating MSX Insights came together to address one remaining issue: getting the data right.
“It was a result of partnership and alignment between the three different teams—MCAPS, Finance and Data Experiences, and Microsoft Commerce and Ecosystems,” says Diego Ulloa, a data strategy lead with Microsoft Worldwide Enablement and Operations who works on MSX Insights. “Together we consolidated data, set business rules, and designed the architecture.”
Power BI as a self-service tool has enabled more consumption of the insights. You don’t need layers of people to pull it into Excel.
– Praveen Vittalrao Ambekar, principal group program manager, Microsoft Partner and Sales Experience Business Insights
“We had to make hard decisions,” Ambekar says. “We had to align to one or the other’s hierarchy.”
The team divided the rules and definitions up by functional area. In the first six months after the launch of MSX Insights, we eliminated 80 percent of the user complaints associated with data hygiene and report accuracy. We’re also improving its ease of use over time.
“Power BI as a self-service tool has enabled more consumption of the insights,” Ambekar says. “You don’t need layers of people to pull it into Excel.”
Collaboration continues to improve data quality and integrity
The group that built MSX Insights isn’t done yet. There’s a robust roadmap planned for the coming months and years.
More trends and customer reports are on the agenda. MSX Insights and the Partner Sales Experience are still evolving, and several other teams are now contributing to these platforms.
“We’ll continue to evolve the user experience,” Ambekar says. “We want the user interface to really match how and where people are working, embedding insights more directly into the experience.”
The collaboration across teams is helping avoid the duplication of efforts.
“Because we hold each other accountable when we go through and talk about the designs, we’re doing it once and doing it well,” Smith says. “It’s better by virtue of us working on it together.”
The path ahead for MSX Insights includes continuous rollouts of additional services and functionality using the latest capabilities in Microsoft Fabric and Power BI. We’re also looking at ways to integrate AI throughout the experience in an effort to enable faster decision making.
“By introducing these abilities to partners, we’re allowing more teams to create a comprehensive set of reports,” Ulloa says. “We’re taking our narrow vision and extending it to a One Microsoft model.”
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