The need for digital transformation

The need for our digital transformation is evident—the global pandemic has created challenges for every organization, from employee placement to supply chain management, to continued retail operations. The investments that Microsoft has made in digital transformation have helped us respond quickly and efficiently to the frequent changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our continued digital transformation will enable Microsoft to further its mission of empowering every person and every organization of the planet to achieve more, and it starts right here at home, with MDEE. Every new challenge presents an opportunity to assess our role in the organization and how we can put Microsoft in an even better position to take on new challenges.

Disruptions have always been a catalyst for business transformation. To lead on the forefront, we’re becoming more agile, efficient, and innovative. This means changing our systems and processes to support and quickly adapt to new products, services, business models, regulations, and anything else that comes our way.

Leading with vision and world-class execution

Leading with vision is the primary driver of our digital transformation. MDEE powers the company, and we are critical to both internal and external customers. To lead with vision, we need a clearly articulated view of where we want to take things and what we need to get there. Aligning our work to a larger vision of what we want to accomplish pushes us past day-to-day fire drills and comfortable routines to deliver something truly great for Microsoft.  Each one of our groups has a clear, targeted vision grounded in what our customers need and what we need as an organization. However, articulating the vision is not enough. An inspired and productive vision must accurately reflect what we actually do.

Vision is the foundation for the major decisions we make, not a document that we write once a year and put on a shelf. Building a strong connection between vision and work can be clarified by telling a story. The vision should create a narrative that informs our day-to-day decisions at every level. Each choice, no matter how granular, should connect itself and contribute to the broader vision. In turn, the vision inspires these choices, supporting aspirations for the business and energizing our employees. Telling the story this way makes us think carefully about how a piece of work fits into the broader vision—or if it doesn’t. It also helps us define our work in a way that’s consumable by our various stakeholder audiences, which is critical if we want them to support and partner with us. If we tell the story well, our stakeholders should be able to tell the story of how our work supports them to others.

[Discover how we’re reinventing Microsoft’s Employee Experience for a Hybrid World. Learn more about Microsoft’s cloud-centric architecture transformation. Find out how we’re enabling a modern support experience at Microsoft.]

Making hard choices

Being vision-led means making difficult and specific choices about where we will focus our efforts, and which work we will need to postpone or simply not do. We ruthlessly prioritize, focusing on what to stop investing in as much as what to invest in next. We set a high bar for quality, delivery, cost, and compliance. Our approach includes observing important guidelines for how we implement our vision and how that informs our operations. This includes:

• Connecting outcomes to the vision and clearly prioritizing.
• Placing user experiences at the center of our designs.
• Building capability and depth within role-specific disciplines.
• Investing in core platforms and systems to drive engineering productivity.
• Using data and insights to continually assess and prioritize our approach, ensuring that we achieve our most important goals and that they align with our vision.

With this mindset and these guidelines for execution, we empower our employees to think strategically. We want them to continually have this question in their minds: What experience do customers have when interacting with Microsoft, and how can we make it better?

Establishing priorities that support our vision

As part of our Microsoft Digital Product Vision, we established and articulated critical priorities that framed our areas of work. We based the priorities on pain points that existed within MDEE and on best-in-class experiences across other organizations that we studied. The priorities continue to define and guide our work, and they act as an organizational tool for measuring our transformation’s progress:

Cloud-centric architecture

Cloud-centric architecture is designed to deliver a consistently high level of service reliability. Our systems in the cloud are agile, resilient, cost-effective, and scalable, so we can be proactive and innovative. Microsoft Azure is at the core of our architecture. We use Azure to automate our processes, unify our tools, and improve our engineering productivity. This includes transitioning to a DevOps model using the out-of-the-box capabilities that Azure DevOps and Azure Pipelines offer. The DevOps model enables faster deployment of new capabilities that are more secure and compliant. A modern cloud-centric architecture is foundational to our digital transformation, and we’re building integrated, reliable systems, instrumented for telemetry, to gather data and enable experimentation. Our investments include:

• Transitioning from on-premises to cloud offerings to enable dynamic elastic compute, geo-redundancy, unified data strategy (Azure Data Lake), and flexible software-defined infrastructures.
• Moving to cloud-centered IT operations, with provisioning, patching, monitoring, and backups for our cloud and on-premises environments utilizing Azure-based offerings.
• Enabling continued company growth and improvement in our platform services while staying flat on the running cost of our services.
• Developing deeper and richer insights into our service reliability, via standardization of monitoring solutions through Azure Application Insights, and standardization of incident-management tooling and automatic alerting. At the same time, we’re increasingly modeling our critical business processes and helping ensure end-to-end integrity through the monitoring and alerting of complex processes spanning multiple systems.
• Providing a powerful feedback loop to our product-group partners (such as those for Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Windows) to showcase Microsoft running on Microsoft. This results in an improved enterprise-customer experience, including running one of the largest SAP instances entirely on Azure and helping ensure that Azure is SAP-ready for our customers.

Secure enterprise

Security is a never-ending, holistic pursuit that requires the same level of innovation and improvement found in every facet of the tech industry. Cloud-based architecture and ubiquitous user access require an enterprise security strategy that embraces identity as the new perimeter and encompasses our entire digital footprint. Improved security, which we’re seamlessly integrating into all parts of our digital transformation, is a component of every product we develop. Our strategy aligns around six core security pillars: device health, identity management, information protection, data and telemetry, risk management, and security assurance. Some of the specific areas in which we’re investing include:

• Using Zero Trust as a model to help protect our infrastructure through enforced device health, strong authentication, least-privileged access, and pervasive telemetry that verifies control effectiveness.
• Eliminating passwords through strong multi-factor authentication.
• Thwarting phishing attacks on our users by using Microsoft Office 365 safe filters and Safe links, phishing detection, and email-delivery prevention.
• Making our Security Operations Center even more efficient and effective through automation and the orchestration of detection and response.

Data and intelligence

Data is the most critical asset that modern organizations possess. The exponential increases in data, sophisticated algorithms, and computational power are fueling modern organizations to make rapid advances in technology and business disruptions. Our data’s value is directly proportional to the number of people within our organization who can find it, understand it, know they can trust it, and then connect it in new and meaningful ways for the deepest insights. We’re turning disparate company data into cohesive insights and intelligent experiences, and we’re investing in core areas including:

• Creating a modern data foundation by aggregating clean, connected, and authoritative data that is catalogued and easily discoverable in a common location and any team can understand how to use to create insights and intelligent experiences.
• Developing AI and machine learning—not to replace human experts but augment and accelerate human decisions using trusted intelligent models built on the wealth of available data.
• Using analytics services to understand user journeys, processes, behavior, and insights, which roll up to executive scorecards to measure our progress against strategic goals.

Customer centricity

Employees and customers belong at the center of our focus and need to feel that they’re doing business with “One Microsoft” across all products and channels. Our ability to digitally transform hinges on a strong foundation of customer data. Achieving a holistic understanding allows us to provide customers with relevant and tailored offers and highly customized customer service by responding to their needs proactively. The complete technology solutions in the offers give customers the best value and a consistent experience. To achieve a security-enhanced and 360-degree understanding of our customers, online identity tenants need to be linked with sales accounts, purchase accounts and agreements, billing accounts, and third-party organizational-reference data. Our investments include:

• Developing customer health-analytics and recommendation engines, using a clean directory and historical customer actions and interactions, to better understand and predict our customers’ needs and how we can add value with our offerings.
• Publishing a shared, authoritative, and clean directory of organizational data and providing the tools and processes to maintain its accuracy and completeness.
• Augmenting the organizational data that Microsoft holds by identifying and managing the relationships for any organization, enabling a more holistic understanding of who the customer is and how we can better serve them.

Productive enterprise

Microsoft employees are at the heart of our mission to enable and support our customers and partners to achieve more. We empower our employees to be their most creative and productive in how they work and collaborate across physical and digital environments. We use Microsoft products and services underpinned with Microsoft 365, AI, and machine learning to deliver connected, accessible, interactive, and individualized experiences for our employees. Our specific investments include:

• Supporting a broad selection of devices, providing a quick and easy setup, and ensuring the devices are always up to date. We provide secure and seamless access to work-related apps, sites, services, documents, and data.
• Developing enterprise search and task-automation capabilities that use Microsoft Search and integrated digital assistants. We’re providing our employees with a coherent and reliable enterprise-search experience and delivering automated micro-task capability to further enhance productivity.
• Enabling team productivity by using Microsoft Teams and Office 365 as the backbone, fostering increased engagement, and accelerating decision making across devices and locations.
• Creating a modern workplace where our employees have integrated digital and physical experiences for finding meeting spaces, indoor wayfinding, transportation, parking, and other workplace services.
• Providing a customizable web and mobile employee experience focused on what’s important to the individual, delivering personalized access to workplace services, and making it easier to quickly complete common tasks.

Turning vision into a practical reality

Our priorities describe what we do, but how we’ll do it is just as important. We’ve made significant changes to the way we work to enable transformation. These changes allow us to take more ownership of our work, run more efficiently and effectively, and build in a way that’s durable over time. With a model for transformation, we can move away from decisions and directions based on team budget availability and move toward the delivery of clear and prioritized business outcomes. We measure our collective success by directly applying this model to our business and not by pure delivery of features. We prioritize as an organization based on where our vision directs us rather than at the local budget level. The practical goal of our vision-led product mindset is to discover the most effective and efficient solutions that will have the greatest impact on the transformational focus areas that make our vision a reality.

[Learn how we’re creating the digital workplace at Microsoft. Discover how we’re transforming modern engineering here at Microsoft. Check out how we’re redefining the digitally assisted workday at Microsoft. Learn how we’re transforming enterprise collaboration at Microsoft.]

Transformed operating model

With an operating model for transformation, we can move away from decisions and directions based on team budgets and move toward the delivery of clear and prioritized business outcomes. Through this model, we’re empowering our business groups and employees by giving them autonomy and decision-making capabilities. Each business group maintains its own vision and has the freedom to prioritize its work based on that vision. However, this work still needs to align with the overarching MDEE vision and is assessed twice a year during a central review. This ensures that work is correctly prioritized and funded across the entire organization. Examples of our transformed operating model include:

• Centralizing funding and prioritization: We’ve moved away from a decentralized, department-focused funding model and toward a centralized model where MDEE owns the budget. In the past, our business groups, such as Finance and Marketing, drove funding and projects. Now, we can use our priorities to fund work based on our vision.
• Insourcing core systems and engineering: We’re managing the systems most critical to our organization’s success with trained, full-time employees. Historically, we outsourced much of this work. However, we’re bringing it back under the control of our employees and retaining intellectual property. We want our people behind the design, development, and operation of our most-important internal products.
• Focusing metrics on business outcomes: Our metrics reflect the business outcomes to which we’re driving as opposed to traditional IT operating metrics. To transform successfully, alignment with our vision and contribution to the organization’s success take top priority. Therefore, how we measure success is based on business outcomes and not on arbitrary metrics.

Product-based approach to our business

To enable world-class execution of the services we build and run, we’re taking a product-based approach to our processes. We want to focus on developing solutions that contribute to our vision, and we want to use agile development methods and product-focused management in our development. Taking a product-based approach to our business means:

• Creating a vision and business-driven agenda: We ensure that anything in which we invest resources aligns to our vision. We’re asking our internal teams to always have the best interest of Microsoft in mind. If it doesn’t align with our vision, it should be questioned—regardless of who’s doing the questioning. We want to produce the best products for our internal and external customers.
• Focusing on skill development and a DevOps structure: A DevOps structure extends the management lifecycle for developers beyond version release. With the DevOps approach, the people on our team in MDEE who build solutions are responsible for the operation, fixes, troubleshooting and ownership over each line of code they write. A DevOps approach and agile methodology focus our employees on a solution’s success both during its development and after it’s in use. This leads to a more fluid evolution of product features and a focus on functionality rather than on feature addition.
• Shifting to product management: We manage products rather than projects. Product management keeps our teams focused on the success of the product rather than the completion of a project. Our product managers are involved in the entire process, from managing relationships with stakeholders to understanding the technical foundations of their products. Product management builds on the DevOps structure to help ensure that teams who develop a solution feel invested in the ongoing success of that solution and not just on the release of the latest version.

Modern engineering and design practices across all processes

Modern engineering focuses on providing a common set of tools and automation that delivers code and new functionality to our employees by enabling continuous integration and delivery practices. We prioritize the most effective outcomes for the business, delivering against a ranked backlog. We add telemetry to monitor customer usage patterns, which provides insights on the health of our services and customer experiences. We want to remove functional silos in our organization and increase the ways in which our infrastructure, apps, and services connect and integrate. Behind all this, we have a unified set of standards that protect and enable our employees. We engineer for the future by:

• Establishing a coherent design system: We’re creating a consistent, coherent, and seamless experience for our employees and customers across all our products and solutions. This means establishing priorities and standards for design and the user experience and creating an internal catalog of shared principles and guidelines to keep our entire organization in sync. Historically, we’ve developed in siloes, which led to varying user experiences and a cacophony of different tools. Now, we’re reviewing work in aggregate and scrutinizing experiences to drive user productivity.
• Creating integrated and connected services: Our move to the cloud increases the overall agility of the development process and accelerates value delivery to the company. We’ve achieved this by re-envisioning our portfolio into a microservice architecture that promotes code reuse and enables cross-service dependencies through APIs. This further enables the delivery of a seamless and integrated experience that brings data and tools together, providing users with intuitive experiences and new insights.
• Building privacy, security, and accessibility standards into our workflow: We integrate tools that support our engineers in building improved privacy, security, and accessibility into our solutions. Without these standards and automated policies, we’d have to rework and clean up as situations change. This is more costly and impacts our velocity of releases to users. Creating standards that we apply organization-wide, and from the beginning, creates an environment of trust in our engineering practices. Our innovations in this area ensure that our solutions also benefit our customers as these solutions are integrated into our commercial products.

Using a customer-zero feedback cycle

In MDEE, we have a unique opportunity to help our customers through their own transformations by sharing our best practices and lessons learned. As early adopters of Microsoft solutions, we provide feedback to our product-development teams and we co-develop solutions with them, which ultimately improves the products that we, and our customers, use to transform. Many of our product enhancements begin as internal solutions to business problems at Microsoft and then evolve within the feedback cycle, and then are incorporated into a final product. A key part of being customer zero is that we provide advice, guidance, and reference materials to customers based on our transformation blueprint and early adopter experience.

Almost every company in the world, including Microsoft, finds itself at a point unlike any other since the industrial revolution. The old IT model hinders the ability to remain relevant in an ever-changing marketplace, and companies must transform to maintain their competitive positioning. At Microsoft, we’ve rallied around transformation and are well underway. We’ve set ambitious goals, and we’re reshaping what we value and how we work. At our core, we’re vision-led and adopting the expectation for world-class execution. The combination of external and internal change presents a significant challenge but, more importantly, it offers a substantial opportunity for us to become more agile and respond more quickly. As a result, we’re in a better position to empower our employees, engage our customers and partners, optimize our operations, and transform our products.

Transformation does not have a finish line—it’s a journey. As we progress through our transformation, we’ll make mistakes and adjust our strategy accordingly, but we’ll also continue to move forward. We will share our transformation journey with our customers with the hope that our experiences can inspire, advise, and assist them through their own transformations.

• Discover how we’re reinventing Microsoft’s Employee Experience for a Hybrid World.
• Learn more about Microsoft’s cloud-centric architecture transformation.
• Find out how we’re enabling a modern support experience at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re creating the digital workplace at Microsoft.
• Discover how we’re transforming modern engineering here at Microsoft.
• Check out how we’re redefining the digitally assisted workday at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re transforming enterprise collaboration at Microsoft.

Share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Understanding Microsoft’s digital transformation appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

We’ve initiated a fundamental change in the way our employees interact and communicate, with Microsoft Teams as the hub for communicating, meeting, and calling. We’re using change management processes and education so that our people can adopt and use Teams to its full capacity. As adoption grows, we are learning from the process and modifying our strategy to help people more efficiently make the cultural shift to the modern workplace with Teams.

Accelerating digital transformation with Microsoft Teams

Teamwork is an important aspect of the modern workplace, and a key element of enabling digital transformation at Microsoft. Microsoft Teams brings together tools and communication methods and is a hub for teamwork. Here on the Microsoft Digital team, we’re on our own path to digital transformation, and we believe that Teams has the potential to offer a new, more efficient way to work. Teams offers significant changes to collaboration, teamwork, and productivity within the Microsoft 365 universal toolkit that we want to realize in the modern workplace at Microsoft. The changes that Teams offers include:

• Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork within Microsoft 365. Teams fulfills the collaboration and communication needs of a diverse workforce, including chat, meetings, voice, and video. The look and feel of these functions is fast and fluid, has low-overhead, and is instantly familiar.
• Microsoft Teams integrates with all the apps our employees use. Teams integrates with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, the Planner task management app, Stream video portal—even Power BI—so employees have the information and tools they need. Team members can also include other apps and services in their workspaces, for the team and organization. Teams allows the ability to customize workspaces with tabs, connectors, and bots. For our developer community, Teams has an extensible platform for building apps with a rich set of capabilities to support high-performing teams.
• Microsoft Teams offers a complete meeting experience. With the advent of Teams-capable conferencing devices, Teams modernizes the meetings experience. Before a meeting, team members can review conversations; during a meeting, teams can share content and use audio conferencing and video. Teams supports private and group meeting capabilities, scheduling capabilities, and free/busy calendar availability.
• Microsoft Teams has integrated security. Teams comes with the enterprise-grade security integrated with the Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Azure Active Directory. It fits neatly into our primary solution for identity and access management, and allows us to maintain control over our data and environment.

Microsoft Teams, in combination with Microsoft 365, creates a hub for modern collaboration and effective teamwork. It empowers our employees to engage with the business and each other in a way that transforms our business for the better, moving our entire organization closer to fully realizing digital transformation. We want to shift our center of gravity to Teams to speed employee productivity and the velocity of communication.

[Find out how to get started with Microsoft Teams. Get in-depth guidance on Microsoft Teams adoption. Visit the Microsoft Teams product page. Explore transforming Microsoft with Microsoft Teams: Collaborating seamlessly, teaming up fearlessly.]

Making adoption happen with change management

At Microsoft, the official decision to implement a workstyle change is typically made at the organizational or executive level. However, the impetus for change starts earlier, in response to the changing business needs of our people or parts of our organization. We have diverse groups that need to work in different ways, and adapting to modern workstyles is exactly what Microsoft Teams adoption is about. Our management recognizes that each of these groups has unique needs, and those needs factor heavily into how we manage organizational change.

Making change a more practical reality

While we want each employee at Microsoft to be empowered to adopt Microsoft Teams in the way that best fits their workstyle, we also realize that identifying the most common uses of collaboration tools helps our people see how Teams can benefit them every day. So, we give them a snapshot of “a day in your digital life.” We built our vision of Teams into the most common tasks in the modern workplace. For example:

• Get up to speed during morning coffee. Use Microsoft Outlook to check email and manage your calendar, Microsoft Teams to check chats and stay current on projects, and the Microsoft 365 productivity apps, OneDrive, and SharePoint to create or review documents.
• Stay connected on your commute. Use Microsoft Teams to join personal meetings or chat with voice and text, Teams and Microsoft Stream to watch live video meetings, and Microsoft Outlook to connect to a meeting from an email or calendar item.
• Hold meetings at the office. Use Microsoft Teams for both small meetings and large meetings with conference room hardware and anonymous participants.
• Collaborate with your team. Use Microsoft Teams to communicate using chat, video, screen sharing, and to coauthor files within a team. Use OneDrive and SharePoint to save and share documents to and from the cloud.
• Connect across the company. Use Microsoft Viva Engage and Yammer to track organizational updates, share knowledge, and find experts and answers. Use SharePoint to create and manage communication sites and publish news for broad groups of stakeholders.

At the core of managing organizational change is understanding how to manage change with a single person. Because overall adoption depends on wide adoption by our employees, much of our change management process revolves around meeting the needs of each employee. The essential needs are:

• Awareness of the need for change.
• Motivation to adopt or support the change.
• An understanding of how to make the change happen.
• The ability to implement or acquire the desired skills and behaviors to make the change.
• Organizational support and reinforcement to make the change permanent.

Establishing structure for change

We also recognize the need for a structured, documented process to help our adoption team coordinate change. We need to provide a common toolset for them to use and enable them to scale initial change into company-wide adoption. We’ve adopted four pillars to help us deliver well-managed change from start to finish.

Awareness

The awareness pillar is about landing the message. Before we even got our employees into training, we knew we needed to make a good first impression, hit the points that will interest them, and find the message that excites employees about Microsoft Teams. The awareness pillar encompasses several important tasks:

• Identify key roles to use teams and describe the value and impact. Our field and role guidance helps our adoption team identify how Microsoft Teams provides value to our employees. We examine the different roles within Microsoft and identify how Teams functionality serves those roles.
• Create a visual campaign to build awareness. Our worldwide visual campaign used a combination of physical and digital advertising and signage across Microsoft campuses, as well as on our internal portal sites and social media platforms to efficiently get Microsoft Teams in front of as many people as possible. We wanted Teams to be recognizable, and we wanted our employees to be aware of its availability and benefits.
• Use internal social channels to engage communities and build excitement. Community engagement is about preparing the organization for adoption and increasing overall awareness. We extended the reach of our awareness materials into company portals. We used Yammer to broadcast our message across the organization and encouraged dialog among employees.
• Inspire adoption with a supportive community of power users and influencers. Creating a community of power users and fans will inspire adoption within their spheres of influence, answer questions, help with social engagement, and give product feedback. Champions are key to ensuring the success of communities. Having executive buy-in reinforced the campaign. When management describes how they personally use Microsoft Teams in a message or speech, people take notice.

Engagement

The engagement pillar builds on awareness and starts putting Microsoft Teams in the hands of our users while ensuring they have the training, guidance, and tools to succeed with it. Engagement is about integrating Teams into our employee’s modern workplace in a way that increases collaborative productivity.

• Run a pilot program to test readiness. The pilot is one of the most crucial components of the adoption process. Early users at Microsoft tested Microsoft Teams and helped us identify how and why our employees would want to use it. We used the pilot program to test and find areas where training or configuration would encourage broader adoption.
• Create buy-in with stakeholders by designing engagements to build momentum. In these engagements, we sat down with our business teams to give hands-on, in-person guidance for using Microsoft Teams. We offered common scenarios for using Teams, demonstrated Teams features, and gave general guidance. It allowed us to focus in on a business team and show how Teams would be used in their day-to-day work.
• Establish opportunities for Q&A. Our Art of Teamwork Tour was an open, large-scale forum for us to present our vision for Microsoft Teams at Microsoft. We identified important and common use cases and showed how Teams could be used. We presented not only the benefits of Teams to the individual, but also to the whole of Microsoft. We explained to our users how Teams fits into our organization.
• Develop internal resources for support and information about using Microsoft Teams. The Toolkit for Teamwork gave people resources to help them move forward with Teams. It offers practical resources to increase engagement and encourage effective use of Teams. The toolkit includes templates, training resources, tips, and tricks.

Measurement

The Measurement pillar keeps track of the practical steps of the engagement pillar. Once we’ve engaged the user community, we need to track the effectiveness of our efforts. Measurement is about acquiring actionable feedback on the adoption process and using that feedback to refine and improve the process.

• Use your pilot feedback to elevate opportunities, offer insights, and adjust course. Our pilot program included a broad cross section of our user base along with some of our most involved and passionate Microsoft Teams adopters. Feedback came through support staff, social channels, UserVoice, and representative leaders. The program validated use-case scenarios and kept us aware of problems and successes during early rollout.
• Create the key areas your organization will use to understand adoption and measure success. We developed monitoring methods and metrics to track progress. We gathered usage statistics to gauge overall adoption and correlate trends to time-of-day, business events, and engagement efforts.
• Establish listening systems to measure engagement. Listening systems provided active feedback from our user base. We used multiple listening systems, including Yammer, to increase our awareness of what our users were saying and how they were responding to Microsoft Teams. Our internal helpdesk identified issues and helped us prepare to mitigate common issues.

Management

The Management pillar is the final pillar of the four and has the longest lifetime of any pillars in the change management process. Management is about gaining efficiency and ensuring user satisfaction once Microsoft Teams is in place. Management means continuing to support Teams and finding user stories and additional training opportunities to support Teams users at Microsoft.

• Improve deployment from employee feedback. As people continue to use Microsoft Teams, we are gauging its effectiveness through the feedback we receive. This helps us identify feature additions or changes, develop additional guidance and training, and adjust Teams implementation, when necessary. We also make sure that training and support is relevant to our people, so they can use the product to the best of their ability.
• Identify user stories. User stories help us show our people how their peers are using Teams. Stories also help us identify active Microsoft Teams users that can be champions for the product in their realm of influence at Microsoft. We try to get a cross-section of stories that are relevant across the organization. These stories evolve based on implementation and needs of the business, and we continue to listen for new stories.
• Continually assess and improve processes. We are continually assessing all processes around Microsoft Teams. We found that some things in our general processes worked well at the start of the adoption process but didn’t work as well later on or once our deployment reached global audiences and employees in the field. It’s a continual process of assessing and improving.
• Stay informed on product and feature changes. We track feature updates and potential changes in Microsoft Teams. This helps us understand how new features affect our use cases, so we can best determine how to implement them.
• Develop support for ongoing use cases and a maturing user base. As people get more familiar with Microsoft Teams, they find new ways to be more productive and collaborate efficiently. We’ve found that the more empowered our employees are to embrace Teams, the more they find their own ways to incorporate Teams into their workflow.

Recognizing Microsoft Teams adoption as social and behavior change

Harnessing employee ingenuity is critical to the overall success and relevance of a business. Working together, people generate more ideas and feel more connected to their work, which improves engagement and retention. Our employees are increasingly mobile and need to have resources and tools available wherever they go. To meet the needs of this changing modern workplace, Microsoft Teams was built as a chat-based workspace in Microsoft 365, with persistent chat, easy file access, customizable and extensible features, and the security that teams trust. We’ve started using Teams to streamline communication, improve collaboration, and get more done together.

However, successful Microsoft Teams adoption is not just technology adoption; it represents a change in behavior. Teams is more than a product—it is a fundamentally different way of working. This change is about people. We found that adoption was as much about social and cultural changes and challenges as it was about technology and tool implementation. Adopting Teams is a different journey than we’ve asked our people to take in the past. With Teams, we asked them to make four fundamental shifts in behavior:

• Chat instead of email. Move away from email as a primary method of communications for fast-moving teams and project management.
• Live in the cloud. Use all Microsoft 365 components in the cloud.
• Embrace flexibility. Empower them to embrace the flexibility of Microsoft Teams for customization.
• Work mobile. Help people to work in whatever way and place suits them best.

To accomplish this journey, we needed to educate people by managing change and offering them readiness skills they may have never embraced for any other product rollout. Even if an advanced customer has these skills within their organization, the change to both collaboration and meeting scenarios can benefit from a fresh approach.

Establishing a communications framework: Spark, ignite, bonfire

Understanding that Microsoft Teams adoption was about social and behavior change, we used the spark, ignite, bonfire communications framework to achieve our primary goals. This framework:

1. Captures the messages, placement, and methods of communication for a change.
2. Defines how these messages will be used to capture the attention of your audience and convert it to sustained interest and engagement.
3. Grows interest and engagement into new behavior patterns, cultural change, and sustainable business outcomes.

Selecting our sparks

The sparks are the “what” of the campaign. They alert your audience to changes and opportunities, and they provide the small but vital beginnings of communicating change. The sparks for Microsoft Teams, and how we used them are:

• • Identify your target audience. Our primary audience for Microsoft Teams is our entire organization. We wanted full engagement throughout Microsoft, but we knew that we would need to refine our communications depending on which of our main demographics we were trying to engage. We used work done in the past with personas, or common company roles and positions, which we customized for the Teams deployment. For each persona, we identified common tasks and work trends and identified how that persona might use Teams in their day-to-day work life. Personas include information about which part of the company the employee works in, their common methods of collaborative communication, and other information about any pain points they experienced and how likely they were to adopt new technology and workstyles. We used a segmented and staged approach to control the velocity of adoption and ensure our adoption processes were as refined as possible.
  • Define your key message(s). We wanted a key message that would speak to our target audience. In an audience as broad as Microsoft, we used several key messages that were focused enough to generate interest and engage our employees. Our key messages included:
    • Chat for today’s teams. Communicate in the moment and keep everyone in the know.
    • A hub for teamwork. Give your team quick access to everything they need right in Microsoft 365.
    • Customize for each team. Tailor your workspace to include content and capabilities your team needs every day.

• Choose the best channels. We needed to choose where and how we were going to get our key messages out. We chose a combination of physical and geographical placement alongside digital placement to ensure that we reached the global Microsoft audience in the most effective and cost-efficient manner. These included:
  • Internal website. We used CSEWeb, our internal SharePoint portal for IT self-help for several pieces of adoption communication. It was the central location for all learning materials, content, and internal announcements about Teams. It also contained FAQs, explained the need for change, and provided a high-level roadmap. It hosted user stories that showed Teams adoption successes.
  • Readiness and gamification. We are creating quizzes and other gamified tools and messages to engage employees. We use small, “snackable” content to make it quick and easy for our people to learn more about adopting Microsoft Teams.
  • Social campaign. We used social networking platforms within Microsoft to get our spark messages out to employees and share user success stories. Yammer gives us a huge opportunity to reach our users. We use it for marketing messaging, user engagement, and answering user questions. It gives us a ready means for social engagement within our organization.
  • Personal targeted communications. We selected specific audiences to be leaders and encouragers of Microsoft Teams adoption. Our Sales group was a big one, because they constantly operate in a highly communicative, dynamic workspace. We used personas to make sure our content and approaches met the needs of many different users and addressed different challenges across different user groups. We also told real user stories about people in different roles, so employees could identify with the use case and apply the lessons to their role.
  • Email. We used email to communicate critical upcoming changes that would affect the way employees use Microsoft Teams and the services that Teams was replacing.
  • Signage. We also adopted traditional methods to put Microsoft Teams in front of our employees. This included signage on campus roads and in campus buildings. We used digital displays on our campuses to reinforce key messages, highlight learning resources and opportunities, and highlight new features.

Moving to ignite

This is the “how” of the campaign. Ignite is designed to convert immediate attention into short-term focus and initiate our adoption steps. We combined our sparks into an ongoing engagement that ignited action from our audience. During the ignite process, we used the following tasks to circulate our sparks:

• Build a communication and readiness plan. We built our communication and readiness plan based on our assessment of our employees and the communication specifics we created with our sparks. We created an internal launch event. The goal was to build awareness and excitement around Microsoft Teams. The launch kicked off a months-long campaign that included many different channels and approaches.
• Create a detailed communications schedule. Part of the planning process included scheduling monthly themes and scheduling out the major elements of our plan. For example, when would we offer in-person training at our main campus in Redmond, and when would we begin rolling out training around the world? We aligned to the product roadmap so we could promote new features as they were released. We also looked at opportunities to partner with other corporate events. For example, we gave participants in the annual Hackathon guidance about how to use Microsoft Teams to collaborate while hacking. Event organizers put the guidance on the hacker resource site.
• Produce creative content for sparks. We created several types of content to reach our users, both detailed and brief. We also created readiness and learning material that was suited to different learning styles.
  • We created user stories to tell real-live success stories from Microsoft employees in different roles across the company.
  • We developed readiness content in the form of both Work Smart guides and web content to help employees who want step-by-step instructions.
  • We produced visual promotional assets to catch employee attention: digital signage, physical signage, online promos for major internal portals, and Yammer posts with visuals and links to more information.
  • We developed content for in-person and online learning sessions and delivered them on campus. We also gave presentation decks and train-the-trainer sessions to training teams managed by our IT Site Operations teams around the world so the sessions were up to date on the product and messaging was consistent.
  • We developed a variety of readiness content. Having readiness content available in different formats is important to suit different learning styles. We had written guides, in-person training, and learning videos.
• Manage campaign execution. Our campaign team worked together to ensure that our communication was being received effectively and the tools we put in place were understood and used properly.
  • Sometimes we had to adjust our approach mid-flight; for example, if we weren’t seeing attendance numbers we wanted for training, we’d look at new, creative ways to get the word out.
  • We also listened for feedback and ideas from our users and trusted stakeholders and adjusted, as needed.
• Generate and review campaign reports, to see progress compared to goals. We used several reporting tools and metrics to gather and measure the success of Microsoft Teams adoption throughout the organization.

Throughout the campaign, we tracked our adoption progress, and focused on growth among weekly active users. We regularly published a report to stakeholders that also looked at the effectiveness of our various channels: web traffic, promo click-throughs, training attendance, training satisfaction surveys, Yammer activity, and how often questions on Yammer were answered.

Adding to the bonfire

Every change communication or campaign should feed the bonfire, which is a constantly growing beacon of the success of Microsoft Teams adoption here at Microsoft. As successes are achieved and advertised, the bonfire helps to:

• Achieve sustainable business outcomes.
• Drive cultural change within the company.
• Establish social norms that encourage taking quick action.
• Draw people to act and connect in new ways.

The most important aspect of the bonfire is that it adds to and integrates with the organization’s high-level technology and culture strategy. Our Microsoft Teams campaign was a piece of a bigger approach to modern workplace communication and readiness. We provided clarity on “what tool when” for our employees to help them understand how Teams fit into the bigger picture and how we envisioned Teams fitting into their workstyle.

During Microsoft Teams adoption, we did our best to be aware of the process, learn how we could improve the process during adoption, and provide lessons that could be applied to future adoption and change management initiatives at Microsoft. Here are few of the things we learned.

• Capitalize on the reach of your marketing campaign. Our initial strategy was in person, getting Microsoft Teams in front of key users and working with them. While it was time-consuming, we found later that were able to reach field and global audiences using virtual methods to broaden our reach. We missed some opportunities to capitalize on early mover enthusiasm within those audiences and found some champions who were creating and sharing their own content.
• Understand the primary use cases for your organization. We approached our people by identifying personas within our organization that defined the most common ways Microsoft Teams would be used. This included not only typical daily use scenarios, but also deeper, scenario-based guidance to help people make the right decision.
• Understand toolset and appropriate-use scenarios. We discovered that directly addressing what tool our users should use for common collaboration tasks helped ease the transition and curb confusion. Directed use gave employees a starting point and then enabled us to measure, through feedback, whether changes or adjustments were needed. At the beginning of the campaign, we didn’t give people a lot of specific guidance, which hurt general adoption. Later, we developed guidance for specific use cases and developed step-by-step guides to take users through important and common tasks, which left them more empowered and engaged with Microsoft Teams.
• Understand the impact of Microsoft Teams on your existing collaboration and teamwork tools. During adoption, we learned that there were times when users weren’t sure what features were available, or if they could or should use a feature—especially when it worked like something they were already using. In contrast, we had a business group that had not used Skype before. We focused on essential scenarios and offered very clear guidance. Because they had not been Skype users, the change management strategy and focus had to be different.
• Align new capabilities and features to your organization’s strategy. We found that our Microsoft Teams adoption needed to be targeted and molded for our vision of transparent communications and open collaboration. Align capabilities to your business strategies rather than allowing technology to direct your strategy.
• Understand your audience. We originally looked at our users in a group, typically organized by work roles. This worked well for several parts of the adoption process, but we failed to look closely enough at secondary groups of users based on factors like age, workstyle, and geography. Once we examined these secondary groups, we found a new set of use cases and scenarios that helped us penetrate even deeper into our user base.
• Plan for executive sponsorship. In the middle of the campaign, we realized that we didn’t adequately involve leadership to help drive Microsoft Teams adoption. We weren’t giving our leadership guidance that was specific or simple enough that they could use it easily. Once we created guidance and a toolset for them to help champion Teams, they were much more engaged and willing to put their effort into Teams adoption within their scope of influence.

Here are more Microsoft Teams resources:

• • Find out how to get started with Microsoft Teams.
  • Get in-depth guidance on Microsoft Teams adoption.
  • Visit the Microsoft Teams product page.
  • Explore transforming Microsoft with Microsoft Teams: Collaborating seamlessly, teaming up fearlessly.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Microsoft Teams increases collaboration in the modern workplace at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

New Admin Center roles and the Experience insights dashboard have changed all that.

Now, users with a wide spectrum of responsibilities can gain access to the data they need. As a result, they can do their work more effectively and take some of the burden off their counterparts in IT.

A technology solution for a tectonic shift in IT

New trends in IT mean technical professionals are increasingly responsible for supporting adoption activities.

“IT organizations have been evolving to respond to their company’s changing needs with digital transformation,” says Karissa Rohde, product manager for Microsoft 365 Admin Center. “For us in the Admin Center, this transformation is extending beyond the technical aspects of managing and configuring Microsoft 365—our traditional role—to using our data to help our friends in IT transform how they do their work.”

Here in Microsoft Digital (MSD), the company’s IT organization, that “evolution” has included transforming the way our IT practitioners work.

“We started to see a new kind of IT role popping up with more of a focus on ensuring employees have the right tools and services and can use them effectively,” Rohde says.

That role? Technology decision influencer (TDI).

Self-serve access to adoption and usage information is crucially important. Now that data is consumable by people who aren’t admins, they can conduct change management and understand the holistic surface area of the user experience.

— Dan Perkins, service engineering manager, MSD

TDIs work within and alongside IT departments, and usage data is an essential part of their efforts. To support their work, Microsoft developed the Experience insights dashboard for Microsoft 365 Admin Center. The dashboard provides crucial insights for TDIs across product usage, feedback, views of help articles associated with individual products, and more.

Previously, these kinds of roles would request data pulls from IT pros with admin access—and they already had enough on their plates. Now, new Microsoft 365 Admin Center roles and the Experience insights dashboard allow self-service access to that data. That saves time for both technical professionals and TDIs and ensures that non-technical employees have access to real-time insights, not just static reports.

“Self-serve access to adoption and usage information is crucially important,” says Dan Perkins, service engineering manager with MSD. “Now that data is consumable by people who aren’t admins, they can conduct change management and understand the holistic surface area of the user experience.”

Matching access with expertise in Microsoft 365 Admin Center

Wider access comes with concerns. The more people have access to organizational data, the greater the risk of compliance violations. Not every role should have deep, administrative visibility into personalized data.

To ensure appropriate access, Microsoft 365 Admin Center provides several different levels of permissions. Three are especially relevant to adoption and change management work:

• Global admin: This is the classic, top-level IT administrator role for people who need access to most management features and data. They can edit or configure settings within the Admin Center.
• Reports reader: This role provides access to usage data and activity reports, the Power BI adoption content pack, sign-in reports and activity through Microsoft Entra ID, and data from the reporting API in Microsoft Graph.
• User experience success manager: The latest role added to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, these users can access the Experience insights dashboard and Adoption Score module, which provide high-level, anonymized data relevant to the TDI role.

“You don’t have to be afraid of sharing what’s in the Admin Center if people have the right roles,” says Amy Ceurvorst, a senior business program manager for change management within MSD. “By assigning the least privileged access that matches a user’s needs, you give them the right level of oversight to meet their needs without risking data overexposure or privacy violations.”

At Microsoft, users across a variety of functions are benefiting from these roles, but they’re primarily involved in adoption. They include change managers, product managers, success specialists, and business relationship managers. We’ve even extended the user experience success manager role to some adoption champions and peer leaders so they can see how they’re influencing usage within their organizations.

Adoption work involves watching usage patterns, monitoring feedback, and creating initiatives to fill in the gaps for employees. To do that, change management professionals frequently need to formulate hypotheses about usage, then test them and build strategies from those learnings.

“In order to validate that you’re drawing the right conclusions, you need resources and expertise in this space,” Rohde says. “We can help reduce the level of entry to get those insights by helping pull together the meaning on top of the data.”

Accessing insights across a variety of roles

Curious about how your teams can use the Experience insights dashboard for their own adoption initiatives? Find out how three people in three different roles within Microsoft are using this tool.

Service engineer

Torrin Miller is a senior service engineer for Microsoft Viva in MSD.

Role and challenges

Torrin Miller has a service engineer role, implementing engineering solutions and ensuring the right users within our tenant are eligible or ineligible for features. In addition to his technical duties, he’s also responsible for assigning Microsoft Admin Center roles like reports reader and user experience success manager to people in his organization.

Without the additional Admin Center roles, service engineers like Miller would have to pull data for change management professionals. Those reports eat into his time and focus, and it can be difficult to know the exact telemetry his colleagues need, wasting time and introducing inefficiency for everyone involved.

Using Microsoft 365 Admin Center

Since the introduction of the more diverse Admin Center roles, Miller’s work has undergone a massive transformation. He can act as more of a data facilitator for his adoption colleagues, ensuring the Experience insights dashboard is curated by feature and data type.

Even with his more privileged admin access, the graphical nature of the Experience insights dashboard and Adoption Score has simplified his work. Instead of generating reports, he can build real-time queries and get context quickly.

Miller’s Microsoft 365 Admin Center recommendations

• Understand your baselines. These will help you make sense of spikes and drops that come along with holidays, international events, and other seemingly unpredictable usage patterns.
• Establish documentation on Admin Center roles, especially if you operate within a large organization with lots of cross-functional teams.
• Follow least-privileged-access principles for everyone accessing Admin Center to avoid compliance and privacy risk.
• Utilize internal tooling to build out your process by making use of tools like Microsoft Forms and PowerAutomate.

“It’s so much easier now that people have visibility and access to usage and adoption data themselves.”
—Torrin Miller, senior service engineer for Microsoft Viva, MSD

The outcomes of access

Both our internal change management professionals and our customers have been accessing the Experience insights dashboard and other Microsoft 365 Admin Center features through these expanded roles.

From the number of people we see accessing these tools, it’s clear that changing trends in IT are picking up steam, and the Microsoft 365 Admin Center is meeting those needs. Seventy percent of first-time users return within one month, demonstrating a real desire to access this kind of usage data outside of the conventional IT role.

The value lies in empowering people to do work they couldn’t before. It enables internal change managers to be less reliant on consultants, compare usage and value across Microsoft or third-party solutions, and make more informed decisions by building a data-driven discipline around adoption.

“Knowledge is power from a change management perspective,” Perkins says. “The more adoption professionals know, the better their decision-making will be, and we see technology as the enabler for those behaviors.”

Here’s how you can get started with the Microsoft Admin Center:

• First you should first familiarize yourself with the various roles available.
• After you have a good understanding of the roles, you can assign the least privileged roles necessary to enable the required tasks for your organization, or request that your IT administrator do so.
• Learn how to get started with the Admin Center and the available dashboards and reports in the Admin Center.
• Try the out-of-the-box reports, such as Experience insights and Adoption Score, to establish data baselines and understand the usage and adoption of Microsoft 365 services within your organization.
• Monitor for changes and anomalies to gather insights. By regularly reviewing the dashboards and reports, you can identify trends, track progress, and identify actions to take to drive impact.
• Validate findings by engaging with users for direct feedback.

You can try the Microsoft Admin Center by signing into the Microsoft 365 admin center with your work or school account here. If you have the necessary permissions, you will be able to access the admin center and explore its features. If you don’t have the necessary permissions, you can ask your IT administrator to grant you access.

• Unpack a foundation for modern collaboration: Microsoft 365 bolsters teamwork.
• Explore insights that influence technology adoption.
• Discover transforming change management at Microsoft with Microsoft 365.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Democratizing adoption data with the Microsoft 365 Admin Center Experience insights dashboard appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Digital is creating a modern support experience that focuses on identifying and remediating issues automatically by enabling seamless support, generating high-quality knowledge content, providing a unified agent experience, and maintaining infrastructure and site-service excellence.

“In talking with our customers and partners, we are hearing that a modern digital support experience that can enable a hybrid working environment is a priority but may seem daunting and complex,” says Trent Berghofer, General Manager of Microsoft’s Modern Support team in Microsoft Digital. ”However, with a comprehensive vision-led approach and targeted investment, the results yielded can have a significant impact.”

Modern Support is part of a broader vision focused on enabling the most productive employee experience possible in today’s ever-changing environment. The team is a diverse, multi-disciplined group of IT professionals that manage end user support, site services, infrastructure deployments, and venture integration to drive employee productivity. This team plans, learns, and adapts to drive and transform the modern employee support journey at Microsoft.

To create an efficient and effective digital first employee support experience, the Modern Support team is improving auto-healing capabilities and enabling digitally assisted support through seamless interaction for employees by providing broad access to support with in-context tools.

Transforming agent assisted support at Microsoft

Although service-level metrics have traditionally been important in overall support health, the need to put greater emphasis on the digital employee experience has proven to be critical. It’s important to understand not only if services and tools are functioning properly, but also whether they meet employees’ and support agents’ needs.

In the area of agent assisted support, Modern Support efforts focus on the two key roles that participate in support activities: employees who experience and report issues and the support agents and technicians who track and resolve those issues.

Several factors prevent employees and agents from experiencing and delivering optimal support. The shift from a support model where work tasks are costly, complex, and require significant support intervention to a model that creates experiences that are easily discoverable, simple, accessible, personalized, and automated greatly improves the overall dynamic. By connecting the experiences that exist today—and the ones in the future—in an end-to-end way, this new model better reflects how people want to seek help, outlined below.

The four pillars of Microsoft’s Modern Support Experience

The team is pursuing Microsoft’s Modern Support vision based on these four critical pillars with our employees in the center.

Pillar 1: Seamless support

Employees need to have the most simplified and transparent support experience possible. For example, if an employee reports an issue with an app they are using, relevant telemetry needs to be gathered systematically and, if possible, trigger automated workflow tasks to help resolve the problem immediately. By using telemetry from the employee’s device, information about the current application context and other relevant data, the system supplies automated remediation tasks to resolve the issue without agent intervention. If automated remediation isn’t possible, users can engage the Virtual Agent from within the app to help diagnose and resolve the issue and, if unsuccessful, the user can be seamlessly handed off to the most appropriately skilled agent via phone or chat with all the previous steps and telemetry provided on a ticket automatically.

As employees embraced hybrid work, Modern Support reopened walk-in support centers by appointment only and added or transformed some locations to virtual support kiosks with video support capability. These centers, both physical and virtual, use technology for online booking and focus on hardware-related issues to minimize wait time while enabling a seamless environment. Employees are able to book an appointment via the Virtual Agent so the bot can drive self-help solutions before finalizing an appointment. Modern Support remains committed to delivering an experience that anticipates the different ways employees need assistance while providing the flexibility and agility employees now require. The team works diligently to resolve the issue remotely prior to having an employee physically show up to a walk-in center.

Also, a 24-hour exclusive executive support service was designed to quickly resolve technology-related issues for our company’s leadership team and their executive assistants. Executive support services also focus on and identify automation opportunities that can be applied throughout the organization.

Key results

Seamless support investments have produced three key results:

• Employees have more time to focus on their job because issues are automatically identified and remediated transparently on their devices. This means less interaction and time interfacing with support.
• Employees get support anytime, anywhere, and the efficient ticketing process doesn’t require a repetitive description of issues or tedious tasks.
• There has been an increased ratio of successful unassisted support incidents vs. assisted support––from 15 percent to 40 percent.

Pillar 2: High-quality, intuitive knowledge support

At Microsoft, employees are empowered to seek self-remediation methods. Accordingly, investments in the capabilities of the company’s knowledge systems make them easier to use for both employees and support agents. Multiple self-help and virtual-agent modalities driven by powerful search technologies that automatically present to employees accurate, meaningful, and simple-to-follow content help them mitigate issues quickly.

Modern Support is rethinking the company’s knowledge base to improve the experience and increase efficiency for employees and support agents. It includes expanding the scope of knowledge for our self-help tools and Virtual Agent, and driving a set of standards, quality, and best practices for the lifecycle management of knowledge content. Integrating with Microsoft 365 Knowledge Base provides not only issue-tracking capability but also automated support processes and predictive recommendations.

Through a broad partnership across multiple teams, employees can retrieve content from a single-entry point that searches multiple domains transparently, including Bing for Business, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft 365 Alchemy, and the traditional support portal. GS&VI resources include a broader range of media types to provide a more optimal support experience. Short, easily consumable, on-demand guidance videos also better support individual content-consumption preferences.

New employee onboarding processes are being improved to ensure employees are prepared for new products and services introduced into their workflow. This also includes new employee onboarding for companies that have been acquired by Microsoft. A complete toolset leveraging Microsoft Viva is now available to new employees to enable them to be more productive on their first day of employment. This is accomplished by unifying onboarding approaches, creating a consolidated content platform, and introducing learning paths based on employee roles and business functions.

Key results

Intuitive knowledge support efforts have produced these key benefits:

• Support content is accessible, simple, easy to follow, and targets a broad reading level and regional context.
• Consumption of support content is tracked and can be correlated to a reduction in employee-initiated support inquiries.
• New employees can more easily find and use knowledge content their first day on the job.
• Employees can easily find and subscribe to high-quality training content that’s relative to the tools and services they use in a variety of media types.

Pillar 3: Unified agent experience

Our support agents and technicians also need the proper toolset to fix issues quickly and support Microsoft employees. To meet this goal, the team is developing and using connected tools and correlated platforms that increase information reuse and employ data pertaining to the support environment. The result will be a seamless experience for both agents and employees.

To improve the agents’ experience, toolsets are being made more intelligent by using machine learning and predictive analytics to enable our agents to access all the information they need to resolve an issue. Telemetry captured on the ticket will drive recommendations and workflows for the agent so they can supply the quickest resolution possible. Intelligent playbooks have also been implemented that automatically present themselves to the agent. These playbooks, based on issue classification, help guide the agent through the troubleshooting process with the employee and ensure a consistent, efficient experience.

Predictive Intelligence allows us to automate many mundane tasks agents must do, such as issue triage and taxonomy management. Tickets are routed to the right team for the first-time using machine learning capabilities, avoiding the need for an agent to review and transfer the task to someone else. This eliminates the waste of time on the ticket lifecycle, thus providing a faster solution for the user. Using Predictive Intelligence, we are also prepopulating taxonomy on behalf of the agent so they can focus on issue resolution and not issue classification.

For tickets created from email or the web and not via our self-help solutions, we are now handing off the management of these tickets to the virtual agent. If a solution is within the scope of the Virtual Agent, then they will proactively reach out to the employees in Microsoft Teams to help on their issue. If successful, the Virtual Agent will manage the update and closure of the ticket. This enables our agents to focus on the most complex problems.

The ticket-resolution toolset gathers robust employee sentiment from chat experiences, call-quality data, and Yammer communities. This information helps agents understand the issues’ complete context and respond more appropriately to the initial employee contact. Agents need to enter the issue-resolution process with the greatest possible chance of success. Employee sentiment also helps Microsoft’s leadership and key stakeholders better understand the issue-resolution process and where intervention might be warranted. The data also helps our product groups and partners to continually improve.

Key results

Unified agent efforts have produced these key benefits:

• A single lens and data repository for the agents. They can manage and interact with tickets from a single location.
• Proactive and predictive support insights. Agents can find and potentially resolve issues before they’re reported by employees.
• Enhanced automated-support capabilities. Automation-assisted mitigation actions expedite resolution of technical issues.
• Automated ticket management and resolution via the Virtual Agent for simple issues.

Pillar 4: Infrastructure and site-services excellence

Aligned with our vision for hybrid workplaces, which enable our people to be connected, engaged, and productive wherever they are, Modern Support field-based teams drive the deployment and operation of innovative technologies and services for over 790 buildings in 110 countries. Modern Support teams are digitalizing on-site experiences and enabling physical spaces as a strategic tool to reenergize our workforce, maintain engagement, and attract and retain the best talent.

Hybrid work is driving significant realignment of how we utilize our physical spaces worldwide, impacting key infrastructure related to collaboration, connectivity, and security. In response to this demand, our infrastructure and AV deployment teams have implemented robust global technology standards to maximize value and drive consistent experiences for our global user base. Unifying data sets such as building occupancy and incident volume with historic project delivery data (including cost, scheduling, and deviations) yields critical insights to support ongoing investment prioritization. Combined with data collected during each project delivery phase (deployment, provisioning timelines, and associated costs), we are able to drive reductions in total cost of ownership and increased overall return on investment through enhanced planning and delivery processes.

One consequence of the shift to hybrid work has been increased demand for richer meeting room experiences that better accommodate remote and in-person participants. To support this demand, Modern Support teams are deploying new Microsoft Teams-powered hybrid meeting room technology across our 14,000 AV-enabled conference rooms worldwide. Bringing remote attendees “into the room” is moving us closer to parity of experience for those attending outside the office.

Key to enabling our vision of digitalizing on-site experiences and empowering our field-based teams is a focus on unifying existing data sources to allow critical insights around workplace experience health. Using infrastructure telemetry (such as network, AV, and environmental (IoT)) to corroborate employee sentiment, captured through both surveys and dynamic sentiment analysis, enables a holistic view of employee experiences in our physical spaces. This data-driven approach has allowed us to introduce the concept of a franchise model to empower Field IT Managers to be fully accountable for services delivered within their geographic scope and effectively drive experience improvement activities.

As we look to embrace the opportunities presented by automation and AI, we are deploying services such as “Just in Time” (JIT) cable room access alongside AI-driven “Computer Vision” solutions to monitor the critical infrastructure hosted in over 1,200 cable rooms globally. Doing this enables us to automate change management processes and ensure physical security for crucial infrastructure components at our sites across the globe. Enriching our CMDB (Configuration Management Data Base) capabilities with these and other new data sources has been key to automating Device Lifecycle Management (DLM) processes across our estate.

Through our continued focus on digitalizing the delivery of our critical on-site experiences, we can optimize support costs while driving employee satisfaction and productivity, aligning with our mission to transform the employee support journey at Microsoft.

Key results

Infrastructure and site-services efforts have produced these key benefits:

• All infrastructure projects are delivered on time, on budget, and within standards or with approved deviations.
• Alert monitoring is on all meeting room assets and site infrastructure (network, IoT) to increase proactive issue detection.
• Customer satisfaction metrics for Modern Support services are met or exceeded at the geographic and site level.

Modern support experience benefits

The Modern Support experience at Microsoft is transforming the way employees and agents experience and provide support across the company. This environment enables employees to be creative, innovative, and productive by providing a support experience that focuses on identifying and remediating issues automatically—before employees are even aware they exist. By creating a seamless support experience, creating high-quality knowledge content, supplying a unified agent experience, and maintaining infrastructure and site-services excellence, employees’ support interactions are greatly improving. This Modern Support experience gives everyone at Microsoft broad, inclusive access that enables employees to do more with less and empowers every person and every organization to achieve more.

Here are tips you can try as you work to transform your support experience at your company:

• Take a vision-led and phased approach when modernizing your support experience.
• Place greater emphasis on the employee experience when measuring your service level support metrics.
• Increase employee productivity by detecting and remediating issues proactively before your employees report them.
• Invest in seamless, in-context support and simple, intuitive knowledge systems to improve employee experience and efficiency.
• Establish a listening system across the organization that can engage with your local stakeholders and employees and be accountable for support services and experience.

• Learn more about how we’re using Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow to enhance our end-user support.
• Find out how we’re reinventing Microsoft’s Employee Experience for a hybrid world.
• See how we’re transforming enterprise collaboration internally here at Microsoft.

The post Enabling a modern support experience at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

We’re accelerating our digital transformation with an enterprise data platform built on Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric. Our solution addresses three essential layers of data transformation:

• Unifying data with an analytics foundation
• Responsibly democratizing data with data governance
• Scaling transformative outcomes with intelligent applications

As a result, we’re creating agile, regulated, and business-focused data experiences across the organization that accelerate our digital transformation.

[Unpack how we’re deploying a modern data governance strategy internally at Microsoft. Explore how we’re providing modern data transfer and storage service at Microsoft with Microsoft Azure. Discover how we’re modernizing enterprise integration services at Microsoft with Microsoft Azure.]

Accelerating responsible digital transformation

Digital transformation in today’s world is not optional. An ever-evolving set of customer expectations and an increasingly competitive marketplace prohibit organizations from operating with static business practices. Organizations must constantly adapt to create business resilience, improve decision-making, and increase cost savings.

Data is the fuel for digital transformation. The capability of any organization to transform is directly tied to how effectively they can generate, manage, and consume their data. These data processes—precisely like the broader digital transformation they enable—must also transform to meet the organization’s needs.

The Enterprise Data team at Microsoft Digital builds and operates the systems that power Microsoft’s data estate. We’re well on our way into a journey toward responsibly democratizing the data that drives global business and operations for Microsoft. We want to share our journey and give other organizations a foundation—and hopefully a starting point—for enabling their enterprise data transformation.

Seizing the opportunity for data transformation

Data transformation focuses on creating business value. Like any other organization, business value drives most of what we do. As Microsoft has grown and evolved, so has our data estate.

Our data was in silos. Various parts of the organization were managing their data in different ways, and our data wasn’t connected.

—Damon Buono, head of enterprise governance, Microsoft

At the genesis of our data transformation, we were in the same situation many organizations find themselves in. Digital transformation was a top priority for the business, and our data estate couldn’t provide the results or operate with the agility the business required.

We felt stuck between two opposing forces: maintaining controls and governance that helped secure our data and the pressure from the business to move fast and transform our data estate operations to meet evolving needs.

“Our data was in silos,” says Damon Buono, head of enterprise governance for Microsoft.  “Various parts of the organization were managing their data in different ways, and our data wasn’t connected.”

As a result, a complete perspective on enterprise-wide data wasn’t readily available. It was hard to implement controls and governance across these silos, and implementing governance always felt it was slowing us down, preventing us from supporting digital transformation at Microsoft at the required pace.

“We needed a shared data catalog to democratize data responsibly across the company,” Buono says.

Transforming data: unify, democratize, and create value

Transforming our data estate fundamentally disrupted how we think about and manage data at Microsoft. With our approach, examining data at the top-level organization became the default, and we began to view governance as an accelerator of our transformation, not a blocker. As a result of these two fundamental changes, our data’s lofty, aspirational state became achievable, and we immediately began creating business value.

Our enterprise data platform is built on three essential layers of data transformation: unifying data with an analytics foundation, responsibly democratizing data with data governance, and scaling transformative outcomes with intelligent applications.

Unifying data with an analytics foundation

Unified data is useful and effective data. Before our data transformation, we recognized the need to unify the many data silos present in the organization. Like many businesses, our data has evolved organically. Changes over the years to business practices, data storage technology, and data consumption led to increased inefficiencies in overall data use.

Analytics are foundational to the remainder of the data transformation journey. Without a solid and well-established analytics foundation, it’s impossible to implement the rest of the data transformation layers. A more centralized source of truth for enterprise data creates a comprehensive starting point for governance and creating business value with scalable applications.

With Microsoft Fabric at the core, our analytics foundation unifies data across the organization and allows us to do more with less, which, in turn, decreases data redundancy, increases data consistency, and reduces shadow IT risks and inefficiencies.

“It connects enterprise data across multiple data sources and internal organizations to create a comprehensive perspective on enterprise data,” Buono says.

Microsoft Fabric ensures that we’re all speaking the same data language. Whether we’re pulling data from Microsoft Azure, multi-cloud, or our on-premises servers, we can be confident that our analytics tools can interpret that data consistently.

Functionally, this reduces integration and operation costs and creates a predictable and transparent operational model. The unity and visibility of the analytics foundation then provide the basis for the rest of the transformation, beginning with governance.

Responsibly democratizing data with data governance

Data can be a transformative asset to the organization through responsible democratization. The goal is to accelerate the business through accessibility and availability. Democratizing data is at the center of our governance strategy. Data governance plays an active role in data protection and complements the defensive posture of security and compliance. With effective governance controls, all employees can access the data they need to make informed decisions regardless of their job function or level within the organization. Data governance is the glue that combines data discovery with the business value that data creates.

It’s critical to understand that governance accelerates our digital transformation in the modern data estate. Governance can seem like a burden and a blocker across data access and usage scenarios, but you cannot implement effective and efficient governance without a unified data strategy. This is why many organizations approach data governance like it’s a millstone hanging around their neck. Many organizations struggle with harnessing the power of data because they don’t have a data strategy and they lack alignment across the leadership teams to improve data culture.

In the Microsoft Digital data estate, governance lightens the load for our data owners, administrators, and users. Microsoft Purview helps us to democratize data responsibly, beginning with our unified analytics foundation in Microsoft Fabric. With a unified perspective on data and a system in place for understanding the entire enterprise estate, governance can be applied and monitored with Purview across all enterprise data, with an end-to-end data governance service that automates the discovery, classification, and protection of sensitive data across our on-premises, multi-cloud, and SaaS environments.

“The governance tools that protect and share any enterprise data are transparent to data creators, managers, and consumers,” Buono says. “Stakeholders can be assured that their data is being shared, accessed, and used how they want it to be.”

Our success begins with an iterative approach to data transformation. We started small, with projects that were simple to transform and didn’t have a critical impact on our business.

—Karthik Ravindran, general manager, data governance, Microsoft Security group

Responsible democratization encourages onboarding and breaks down silos. When data owners are confident in governance, they want their data on the platform, which drives the larger unification and governance of enterprise-wide data.

Scaling transformative outcomes with intelligent applications

The final layer of our data transformation strategy builds on the previous two to provide unified, democratized data to the applications and business processes used every day at Microsoft. These intelligent applications create business value. They empower employees, reduce manual efforts, increase operational efficiencies, generate increased revenue, and contribute to a better Microsoft.

How we transformed: iteration and progression

While the three layers provide a solid structure for building a modern data platform, they provide value only if implemented. Actual transformation happens in the day-to-day operations of an organization. We transformed by applying these layers to our business groups, data infrastructure, and even our cultural data approach at Microsoft Digital.

“Our success begins with an iterative approach to data transformation,” says Karthik Ravindran, a general manager who leads data governance for the Microsoft Security group. “We started small, with projects that were simple to transform and didn’t have a critical impact on our business.”

These early projects provided a testing ground for our methods and technology.

“We quickly iterated approaches and techniques, gathering feedback from stakeholders as we went, Ravindran says. “The results and learnings from these early implementations grew into a more mature and scalable platform. We were able to adapt to larger, more complex, and more critical sections of our data estate, tearing down larger data silos as we progressed.”

To understand how this worked, consider the following examples of our transformation across the organization.

Transforming marketing

The Microsoft Global Demand Center supports Microsoft commercial operations, including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and Dynamics 365. The Global Demand Center drives new customer acquisition and builds the growth and adoption of Microsoft products.

The Global Demand Center uses data from a broad spectrum of the business, including marketing, finance, sales, product telemetry, and many more. The use cases for this data span personas from any of these areas. Each internal Microsoft persona—whether a seller, researcher, product manager, or marketing executive—has a specific use case. Each of these personas engages with different customers to provide slightly different outcomes based on the customer and the product or service. It’s an immense swath of data consumed and managed by many teams for many purposes.

The Global Demand Center can holistically manage and monitor how Microsoft personas engage with customers by converging tools into the Microsoft Digital enterprise data platform. Each persona has a complete picture of who the customer is and what interactions or engagements they’ve had with Microsoft. These engagements include the products they’ve used, the trials they’ve downloaded, and the conversations they’ve had with other internal personas throughout their lifecycle as a Microsoft customer.

The enterprise data platform provides a common foundation for insights and intelligence into global demand for our products. The platform’s machine learning and AI capabilities empower next actions and prioritize how the Global Demand Center serves personas and customers. Moving the Global Demand Center toward adopting the enterprise data platform is iterative. It’s progressive onboarding of personas and teams to use the toolset available.

The adoption is transforming marketing and sales across Microsoft. It’s provided several benefits, including:

• More reliable data and greater data quality. The unification of data and increased governance over the data create better data that drives better business results.
• Decreased data costs. Moving to the enterprise data platform has reduced the overall cost compared to managing multiple data platforms.
• Increased agility. With current and actionable data, the Global Demand Center can respond immediately to the myriad of daily changes in sales and marketing at Microsoft.

Improving the employee experience

Employee experience is paramount at Microsoft. The Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team is responsible for all aspects of the employee experience. They’re using the enterprise data platform to power a 360-degree view of the employee experience. Their insights tool connects different data across Microsoft to provide analytics and actionable insights that enable intelligent, personalized, and interconnected experiences for Microsoft employees.

The employee experience involves many data points and internal departments at Microsoft. Previously, when data was managed and governed in silos, it was difficult to build data connections to other internal organizations, such as Microsoft Human Resources (Microsoft HR). With the enterprise data platform, the Employee Experiences team can access the data they need within the controls of the platform’s governance capabilities, which gives the Microsoft HR department the stewardship and transparency they require.

The enterprise data platform creates many benefits for the Employee Experiences team, including:

• Coordinated feature feedback and implementation. All planned software and tools features across Microsoft align with employee feedback and practical needs obtained from the enterprise data platform.
• Better detection and mitigation of issues. Intelligent insights help Employee Experiences team members identify new and recurring issues so they can be mitigated effectively.
• Decreased costs. The efficiencies created by using the enterprise data platform reduce engineering effort and resource usage.

Creating greater sustainability in operations

Microsoft Sustainability Operations supports efforts to increase global sustainability for Microsoft and minimize environmental impact. Sustainability Operations is responsible for environmental efforts across the organization, including waste, water, and carbon management programs.

Their internal platform, the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, is built on the enterprise data platform. It leverages the unified analytics and governance capabilities to create important sustainability insights that guide Sustainability Operations efforts and programs.

These insights are combined in the Microsoft Environmental Sustainability Report. This report contains 20 sections detailing how Microsoft works to minimize environmental impact. The report includes sections for emissions, capital purchases, business travel, employee commuting, product distribution, and managed assets, among others.

To provide the data for this report, Sustainability Operations has created a data processing platform with the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability that ingests and transforms data from Microsoft Operations into a data repository. The unified data enables the team to create reports from many different perspectives using a common data model that enables quick integration.

Governance is central to the effective democratization of data, and when data is adequately democratized—safely accessible by everyone who should access it—transformation is accelerated. Modern governance is achievable using automated controls and a self-service methodology, enabling immediate opportunity to create business value.

—Damon Buono, head of enterprise governance, Microsoft

The Microsoft Environmental Sustainability Report supports decision-making at the enterprise and business group level, which enables progress tracking against internal goals, forecasting and simulation, qualitative analysis of environmental impact, and compliance management for both perspectives. These tools allow Microsoft Sustainability Operations to discover and track environmental hotspots across the global enterprise with greater frequency and more precision. Using these insights, they can drive changes in operations that create more immediate and significant environmental impact reductions.

Implementing internal data governance

Governance has been a massive part of our journey. Realizing governance as an accelerator of transformation has radically changed our approach to governance. Understanding who is accessing data, what they’re accessing, and how they’re accessing is critical to ensuring controlled and measured access. It also creates the foundation for building transparency into the enterprise data platform, growing user confidence, and increasing adoption.

“Governance is central to the effective democratization of data, and when data is adequately democratized—safely accessible by everyone who should access it—transformation is accelerated,” Buono says. “Modern governance is achievable using automated controls and a self-service methodology, enabling immediate opportunity to create business value.”

Our governance strategy uses data standards and models with actionable insights to converge our entire data estate, which spans thousands of distinct data sources. We built our approach to data governance on some crucial learnings:

• Evidence is critical to driving adoption and recruiting executive support.
• Automated data access and a data catalog are critical to consolidating the data estate.
• Data issue management can provide evidence, but it doesn’t scale well.
• A centralized data lake, scorecards for compliance, and practical controls help create evidence for governance in large enterprises.

We continue to drive the adoption of the enterprise data platform at Microsoft. As we work toward 100 percent adoption across the enterprise, we generate efficiencies and reduce costs as we go. The iterative nature of our implementation means we’ve been able to move quickly and with agility, improving our processes as we go.

We’re really very excited about where we are now with Purview, Fabric, and the entire suite of tools we now have to manage our data here at Microsoft. They are helping us rethink how we use data internally here at Microsoft, and we’re just getting started.

—Karthik Ravindran, general manager, data governance, Microsoft Security group

We’re also supporting organizational alignment and advocacy programs that will increase adoption. These programs include an internal data governance management team to improve governance, an enterprise data education program, and a training program for the responsible use of AI.

As our enterprise data estates expand and diversify, tools like Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric have become indispensable in ensuring that our data remains an asset, not a liability. These tools offer a compelling solution to the pressing challenges of governing and protecting the modern data estate through automated discovery, classification, and a unified approach to hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

“We’re really very excited about where we are now with Purview, Fabric, and the entire suite of tools we now have to manage our data here at Microsoft,” Ravindran says. “They are helping us rethink how we use data internally here at Microsoft, and we’re just getting started.”

• Go here to try out Microsoft Purview if you’re using Microsoft 365 E3.
• Click through here to try out Microsoft Fabric.

• Unpack how we’re deploying a modern data governance strategy internally at Microsoft.
• Explore how we’re providing modern data transfer and storage service at Microsoft with Microsoft Azure.
• Discover how we’re modernizing enterprise integration services at Microsoft with Microsoft Azure.

Your feedback is valued, take our user survey here!

The post Transforming data governance at Microsoft with Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At the heart of this transformation is an obsession with the Microsoft employee experience.

In our view, the employee experience is a nexus where personal needs and employee needs are both met. When this is great, employees are highly satisfied with the experience and are very productive. The activities that hit the mark on this range from generic experiences applicable to all employees—like finding available meeting rooms, searching for internal information, or understanding their benefits—to more role-specific experiences, like manager insights to support their teams or loading sales data into a CRM system.

The employee experience isn’t limited to day-to-day activities; it’s considered throughout the employee’s lifecycle: from onboarding and internal role changes through to retirement.

A keystone to empowering employees in how they do their jobs is to understand what employees need by identifying their top challenges and successfully meeting their needs. Before our digital transformation advanced in earnest, we would make changes without fully understanding whether they met our employees’ needs and we often wouldn’t do enough to help them adapt to the changes. This was met with limited success.

Getting to a better place required a change in mindset, as shared by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: “As a culture, we are moving from a group of people who know it all to a group of people who want to learn it all.” To learn it all, we began establishing listening mechanisms to learn from our employees, recognizing that as technologies advance, employee expectations of their devices and experiences advance as well, with increasing expectations that both work seamlessly to enable them to do their best work.

[Read the second blog in the series on how Microsoft is transforming the company’s employee experience by listening to employee signals. Read the third blog in the series on how investment prioritization is driving the transformation of Microsoft’s employee experience. Learn how Microsoft Digital is reinventing the employee experience at Microsoft.]

Strategies for capturing employee signals

When we started down the path of understanding our employees’ needs, we realized we had to develop a comprehensive set of employee signals first. To us, signals are indicators of employee satisfaction with the tool or service. Examples of signal sources include employee survey data, direct interviews with employees or leaders, and product usage data (we’ll explore these sources in greater detail in a moment). Our strategy relied on some signal sources that were already in place, but to meet our goals, we expanded our sources to ensure we listened to all employees.

Being a global enterprise, we had to consider our many cohorts of employees—all countries and regions; all roles, including individual contributors, managers, and leaders; the locations of all workers, including remote, in-office, and hybrid. We needed to make sure we didn’t exclude picking up signals from any group.

We used existing data trends to understand our employees without disrupting them (such as telemetry and usage data). This informed an initial indication of where pain points or adoption blockers might be.

We also needed to hear directly from our employees to confirm or alter those initial impressions, so we established several proactive mechanisms to gather feedback. The following diagram shows an example of some of the signal types used to gather this data. We will explore some of those listening signals more here.

Proactive employee signals

We gather proactive signals preemptively, and they’re critical in helping us understand what our employees think. Here are several ways we proactively gather those signals and some of the expected outcomes we have for them:

• Satisfaction surveys: Our approach to understanding employee satisfaction has evolved through the years, but surveys remain a foundational feedback source. We have many different teams at Microsoft who want to survey our employees, so we must rationalize how frequently we seek feedback, be strategic in asking the right questions, and adjust based on the groups we survey. If we ask a question, it needs to be worth the employee’s time to answer and valuable enough to act on based on the results. Some of our established surveys have a brand and are recognizable to our employee communities. In many cases, our strategy is to use these existing surveys by either extending them with customized questions or utilizing the data they gather. Once results are finalized, we analyze the data and consider trends against previous rounds of the same data.
• In-app feedback: This type of proactive signal is meant to meet employees where they are and allows them to provide feedback in real time as they’re experiencing a problem or bug. In-app feedback usually addresses feature-specific pain points, and it always requires people with specific expertise on the platform to help triage the feedback.
• Point-in-time interactions: For deeper qualitative insights, we use point-in-time interactions. This includes speaking directly to employees about their experiences. We do this through voluntary employee insider programs or by using our internal research teams, who are experts at gathering insights on the design of new solutions and feedback on employee workflows. Employees chosen for these programs often include our heaviest users or those whose job it is to understand the needs of different employee groups (such as sellers and finance).
• Formal business reviews: Each organization at Microsoft operates on a unique cadence and rhythm with different requirements and needs. These discussions surface important organizationally specific needs but can also help surface tool or process-related pain points correlating to the overall Microsoft employee experience too. We align representatives from our Microsoft Digital business to these areas and business units to ensure that we capture those insights.

Reactive employee signals

Reactive signals come from employees sharing their feedback and needs either directly or indirectly through their interactions with tools, and are a source of direct evidence of how they actually use a product or service:

• Communities and social channels for sentiment analysis: Sentiment algorithms to monitor key employee communities are a great way to identify trends, and we consistently capture those anonymized sentiments. Sentiment trends allow us to examine known, acute issues and look for new emerging themes. We also can use these engines to ask questions directly and get real-time feedback in an informal way that doesn’t feel disruptive to the employee.
• Telemetry and usage data: Anonymized usage data enables tracking an employee’s experience within a tool or app, which enables us to gauge adoption or success metrics for a given tool or scenario. For example, when we deployed Microsoft Teams internally, we evaluated several usage indicators to determine if our adoption goals were on track, including a gradual decline trend in email usage among employees as well as increase in Microsoft Teams functionality like chat, file share, and more.
• Support incident analysis: Our support team tags and categorizes each support incident by type, solution, and employee group (such as engineer, sales, finance, and so on) to categorize issues and themes by key demographics. We use these insights to validate the qualitative feedback we receive through proactive and reactive channels.

Connecting what employees said with how employees acted

By evaluating reactive and proactive signals, we can connect what employees say with how employees act. Consider this example. Last year, more than 40 percent of support calls for our primary sales system were related to access or login issues. This amount of volume alone had significant productivity, satisfaction, and operating cost implications. And the volume of these reported issues was growing.

At first glance, it may seem that this was a simple access issue. But it was through analysis of additional proactive and reactive signals—like business reviews and social channels—that we saw the challenge was beyond just these access issues. It wasn’t just a technical issue; it really was a training issue. Without that deeper analysis, we would have addressed the wrong problem.

Building on the foundation

In the subsequent articles that comprise this series, we will share the steps we took to change our approach by listening to our employees and demonstrating how we addressed some of their biggest pain points. Here’s what you can expect in each article:

• Analyzing and prioritizing employee signals: Understanding trends and themes across data sources and tips for data-driven prioritization strategies.
• Influencing to prioritize the change: Connecting the story in the change management strategy to the original employee signals to drive adoption velocity.

Digital transformation at Microsoft will continue as our business evolves and emerging technologies like AI and machine learning offer new avenues to accelerate that change. What won’t change is our foundational commitment to learn, grow, and obsess about not only our customers but also our employees. We’re excited to show you how.

• Read the second blog in the series on how Microsoft is transforming the company’s employee experience by listening to employee signals.
• Read the third blog in the series on how investment prioritization is driving the transformation of Microsoft’s employee experience.
• Learn how Microsoft Digital is reinventing the employee experience at Microsoft.

The post Digital transformation through mastery of the Microsoft employee experience appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At Microsoft, we recognize that the best way to answer this question is to analyze the signals our employees are giving us and apply a strong prioritization model to the results. That way, we can land on an accurate list of top employee challenges.

In the first post of this series, we discussed how important it has been for us to transform Microsoft’s employee experience, and shared our strategy for capturing employee signals.

Here, we shift our focus to how we consolidate, analyze, and prioritize our employee signal data.

[Read the first blog in this series about how digital transformation is powering the Microsoft employee experience. Read the third blog in the series on how investment prioritization is driving the transformation of Microsoft’s employee experience. Learn how Microsoft Digital is reinventing Microsoft’s employee experience.]

Analysis requires subject matter expertise and context

Every source of employee signals is a data set. For us to have the best level of analysis, we have found it’s best to have experts who are close to the data and the employees providing the relevant signals in order to verify any themes identified. For example, when we get signals from a particular global role in our field (such as technical specialists), we have an expert validate the signal and give us context around what it might mean. The clarity we get comes from how well they understand any contributing factors and business context.

In the case of more technical data sets like telemetry, usage, or support incident data, we seek out application owners, support engineers, and others working in these systems to gain context. A few months ago, we noticed a 50 percent spike in employee support ticket volume related to a critical service. We verified our analysis with the support engineer who was working at the time and confirmed that an outage was the cause of the support ticket volume increase. In this case, it ended up being an acute issue as opposed to a more systemic challenge, but the conversation was critical to making this determination.

The takeaway: Every employee signal should go through verification or validation of the root cause.

Biggest challenges manifest through multiple signals

Even though they pose problems for our employees, we don’t look for the small or acute issues because they’re less important than big, complex challenges—the ones that require multiple people and organizations to work together to solve. These big problems are also often ones that haven’t been appropriately prioritized, budgeted, or solutioned. If left unattended, it’s these problems that become systemic and fundamentally harm the employee experience.

What we have learned is that those big, complex challenges are easily detected via multiple signals. We’ve also learned that it’s worth the due diligence of cross-checking any identified theme in one signal across the other signals to see if they’re related (or the same thing showing up in a different way). After cross-checking, we can have confidence that a challenge is related to a previously reported priority or that it’s a unique, new challenge.

At the conclusion of a round of analysis across all our sources of data, we have a large list of candidates that we call our “top employee challenges.” The data we use to derive these challenges becomes the reasoning behind our case for change. We’ll talk more about that in our third post in this series.

In our previous post, we spoke about our sellers having issues gaining access to a key sales system. This challenge began to reveal itself in subtle ways across almost every employee listening system we had established for sellers. We heard it in our executive reviews, in-application feedback, through support channels, in survey data, and via role-based interviews.

By triangulating across our sources, we discovered that this wasn’t just an access issue; it also illuminated a lack of consistency about how we provide access to critical tools. That lack of consistency impacted our onboarding of new employees as well as when our employees switched roles within Microsoft. The additional analysis helped us to not only better qualify the problem statement, but also gave some hypotheses for root causes. It’s because of this that we rely on multiple sources of information for a theme to emerge in our list of top employee challenges.

The takeaway: Triangulating across feedback sources leads to richer and more actionable insights.

Business impact as a prioritization model

With limited budgets and resources, our ongoing challenge is deciding which employee challenges to tackle first.

Within Microsoft, different teams have different ways of prioritizing work. We have gone through several evolutions of our prioritization model—we’ve added components, removed others, weighted them differently—but what we have found is that no prioritization model is perfect. There is a silver lining to this: every prioritization model attempts to maximize business impact, whether it’s internal or external facing. The following diagram about tackling challenges that generate business impact shows some of the employee experiences that our prioritization system could surface for us to work on next.

The point of having a model is to have a starting point for a conversation and to compare seemingly dissimilar challenges with the same set of criteria. It doesn’t have to be stack ranked if that’s too controversial, but it should be centered around your employees.

The takeaway: Use a consistent prioritization model to maximize the value of your investments.

In our final post in this three-part series—Influencing to prioritize change—we will discuss how to take an identified top employee challenge and work across your organization to influence change. We will then close the series by sharing how listening to employee signals and prioritizing them appropriately is helping us to transform Microsoft’s employee experience to make our employees even more productive and effective in their roles.

• Read the first blog in this series about how digital transformation is powering the Microsoft employee experience.
• Read the third blog in the series on how investment prioritization is driving the transformation of Microsoft’s employee experience.
• Learn how Microsoft Digital is reinventing Microsoft’s employee experience.

The post Transforming Microsoft’s employee experience by listening to employee signals appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

A fundamental element to empowering employees is transforming employee signals to an actionable list of employee challenges and needs.

In the first and second posts in this series, we explored strategies to capture employee signals and an approach to analysis and prioritization. Part of the advantages we have at Microsoft is that we have a talented group of program managers and support teams strategically located across the globe and sitting with our employees.

In this article, we focus on how employee needs get prioritized for investment. In discussions with companies across many industries (insurance, healthcare, automotive, beauty, retail, and more), the struggle is the same: with so many competing needs, how do we prioritize the right investments and improvements in our technologies to—in our case—improve Microsoft’s employee experience?

The most challenging aspect of improving Microsoft’s employee experience is influencing the decision-makers to agree that:

1. The employee need is significant enough to warrant being a priority.
2. Funds and other resources should be allocated to fix it.
3. A plan is needed to effectively land the change once implemented with the employee base.

[Read the first blog post in this series about how digital transformation is powering the Microsoft employee experience, and check out the second blog post about transforming Microsoft’s employee experience by listening to employee signals. Learn how Microsoft is reimagining meetings for a hybrid work world.]

Data-driven business cases to influence

At Microsoft, we create a business case to support each identified top challenge. We’ve learned that the best business cases tell a story reinforced by irrefutable data. It also identifies root causes and potential solutions as well success measures to understand when the need has been met.

In the first and second post in this series, we discuss the example of our sellers having issues gaining access to a key sales system. Potential cost savings can provide powerful evidence to support the business case for change. We knew that our support teams were burdened by increasing support requests in multiple countries, as nearly 45 percent of support incidents were associated with these issues. The business case showed the actual cost and resource impact (both support engineer time and impact on seller productivity) associated with this issue. Identifying these costs is meaningful because they impact two different leadership groups—support engineering and sales. Support leadership faces constant pressure to lower costs while sales leadership cares about increasing face time with the customer and boosting seller productivity.

The business case also included an action plan to identify key next steps: stakeholders that need to be involved and building consensus on a path forward. Microsoft, like many large enterprises, has a complex organizational structure and competing internal priorities. As a result, it can be difficult to build consensus. The action plan is meant to provide clarity on next steps to drive stakeholder alignment. Planning up-front helps to ensure a comprehensive solution with the right levels of buy-in, avoiding headaches during delivery.

Delivering change back to employees

A substantial part of solving the employee challenge is designing and building a solution that is inclusive of people, process, tools, and information. Beyond solutioning, our focus here is on delivering a change and communicating it to employees once it has been identified, developed, and deployed.

At Microsoft, we’ve adopted a people-centric model for change management that prepares, equips, and supports employees as they move through a change. We have team members who are embedded in strategic locations around the globe, which helps us build deeper relationships, empathy, and cultural understanding of how a change might be perceived at a local level. Our change approach is customized by business requirements and local subtleties. Changes to address a top employee challenge are easily connected back to the employee signals. Because of this, we can articulate a change in the context of the original employee pain point: “You asked, we answered.”

Our people-centric model creates a virtuous, closed loop cycle. Now that the employee feels heard and their challenges are addressed, employees are empowered to be more vocal about their future experiences.

We’ve had many successes with this approach and continue to evolve as we learn more about empowering employees through our listening efforts. It’s one of our key methods for driving digital transformation at Microsoft.

How are you empowering your employees at your company? To share your experiences, ask other IT professionals and partners for advice or information, and find additional resources, join the new Microsoft 365 Community.

Let’s keep the conversation going! Please continue to visit Microsoft Digital Inside Track for more on how we’re digitally transforming at Microsoft.

Read the first blog in this series about how digital transformation is powering the Microsoft employee experience.

Read the second blog in the series on how Microsoft is transforming the company’s employee experience by listening to employee signals.

Learn how Microsoft is reimagining meetings for a hybrid work world.

The post Driving the transformation of Microsoft’s employee experience with investment prioritization appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

With sensitivity labels, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE), the organization that supports, protects, and empowers the company, can now proactively enforce policies to keep shared workspaces safe. Microsoft 365 groups, SharePoint sites, Teams, Viva Engage communities, and any container used throughout Microsoft now utilize sensitivity labels to identify and proactively protect valuable information. In doing so, Microsoft can strengthen self-service without exposing sensitive information.

What sensitivity labels mean for Microsoft

Regardless of the technology behind it, labels represent a visual cue to people interacting with a shared workspace or document. Labels can inform an enterprise’s governance practices, letting the organization describe the landscape to properly manage it and enact the right policies.

At Microsoft, labels enable our employees to identify different degrees of value. Based on the label, we can apply the right amount of protection.

Previously, when a Microsoft employee created a new group a Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AAD) label would help classify it, denoting who should have access to the shared workspace according to Microsoft’s policies. On its own, an AAD label doesn’t do anything; it’s simply a string of descriptive text incapable of enforcement. Custom scripts run by administrators would apply policy rules based on these AAD labels. As a consequence of the gap between classification and enforcement, users could accidentally ignore the policies, creating circumstances where the group is out of compliance. Once the non-compliant container is recognized and remediated by the custom solutions, the user might be surprised or disrupted by enforcement actions taken to protect and secure the workspace.

In moving to sensitivity labels, we in MDEE are able to further empower users with compliant self-service right out of the box. Enforcement happens through sensitivity labels, so users are never disrupted or required to take additional compliance actions; they have a clear understanding of classification from the start, creating a better user experience while protecting the enterprise. The migration allows the organization to retire several custom solutions that are no longer necessary. Sensitivity labels have also enabled us to unify content and container classifications, creating consistent taxonomy and the opportunity for centralized administration.

Labels define the culture

Applying labels to a workspace not only informs the organization as to what a site or container is, but drives a culture of good governance. To have a successful implementation of sensitivity labels, MDEE built strong, meaningful, and self-explanatory labels. Alignment with partners at Microsoft Digital Security and Resilience (DSR) meant labels could communicate the level of sensitivity in the workplace or document without a technical explanation.

At Microsoft, we use four labels for container and file classification:

• Highly confidential. The most critical data for Microsoft. We share it only with named recipients.
• Confidential. Crucial to achieving Microsoft’s goals. Limited distribution—these are on a need-to-know basis.
• General. Daily work used and shared throughout Microsoft, like personal settings and postal codes. We share these throughout Microsoft internally.
• Public. Unrestricted data meant for public consumption, like publicly released source code and announced financials. We share these freely.

These definitions inform policies from a technological side, and once taxonomy was established, we were able to enforce consistent security policies across the company. From a user’s perspective, understanding these terms is easier to comprehend than the underlying rules and settings behind the classifications. Labels are intended to support security without creating an extra burden for users. It’s not always easy for users to understand the details of security, but they do understand constructs like “General,” “Confidential,” and “Highly Confidential.”

Aligning on label taxonomy also secured buy-in for company defaults. For some companies, governance policies are open by default, whereas Microsoft is closed.

With the new sensitivity labels, container classification communicates four things:

• Privacy level. Labels determine whether the workspace is broadly available internally or a private site.
• External permissions. Guest allowance is administered via the group’s classification, allowing specified partners to access teams when appropriate.
• Sharing guidelines. Important governance policies are tied to the container’s label. For example, can this workspace be shared outside of Microsoft? Is this group limited to a specific division or team? Or is it restricted to specific people? The label establishes these rules.
• Conditional access. While not implemented at Microsoft, tying identity and device verification to container labels introduces additional governance controls.

Unification makes things simpler

Prior to sensitivity labels, AAD tagged containers at a tenant level with document labeling being handled by security and compliance, or Microsoft Purview Information Protection. As a consequence, the two artifacts lived in two separate locations, requiring administrators to visit different sites for managing governance.

The two locations also meant container labels worked a little differently than document labels. Where tenant-level AAD labels for a container would display an entire list of classifications, document labels only showed classifications that were appropriate to the user. Once unified, sensitivity labels for containers only populate appropriate classifications, limiting the list to valid labels for the users and groups.

Shifting labels from AAD to Microsoft Purview Information Protection, where data-loss prevention and retention takes place, unified labels across the company, reduced the workload for administrators, and allowed Microsoft to take another step forward in readying the environment.

Strategic governance with labels

By using terms for labels that mean something to people, label definition becomes intuitive and reinforces a culture of accountability. Establishing this level of awareness creates corporate buy-in. Getting the company to stand behind these specific label classifications not only supports a consistent experience, but informs corporate strategy decisions around privacy and sharing.

Rationalizing a hierarchy of policies establishes where you are today and where you’ll be tomorrow. Currently, there’s no concept of inheritance between a container and its content. Labeling a workspace highly confidential does not pass that trait on to documents stored inside. In the future, however, unified taxonomy and centralized administration creates the opportunity for an efficient connection between the workspace’s label and the classification of documents within.

Readying Microsoft for sensitivity labels

For some organizations, those coming from a green state with no existing AAD classifications in place, sensitivity labels can be easily onboarded, and offer a chance to introduce a strong culture of governance.

But for companies like us at Microsoft, where existing AAD labels and custom governance solutions were already established, moving to sensitivity labels required preparation and alignment across the company before migration could occur.

Aligning on label definition

Onboarding sensitivity labels gave us an opportunity to create consistent classification language for containers. This entailed conversations about balancing employee experience and enablement with security and legal implications. Agreeing on taxonomy and selecting terms with meaning allowed us to protect the enterprise while empowering self-service.

Planning the migration

With clear taxonomy and a strong governance strategy, we were ready to start working on the logistics of applying sensitivity labels to existing containers. Careful coordination, including organized efforts and timing, prevented users from experiencing any disruptions in productivity or security while sensitivity labels were rolled out.

Synchronizing timelines with stakeholders

For a short period, we existed in a unique hybrid state, with both AAD and sensitivity labels active across the enterprise. To avoid any derailments or threats to the environment, we in MDEE had to time the conversion of existing labels to new sensitivity labels correctly.

Whether it be Microsoft Teams, Viva Engage, or a Microsoft 365 group, certain user interface and backend changes had to be completed to enable sensitivity labels. All stakeholders agreed to tasks and workloads that needed to be completed during a specific release cadence. This allowed the hybrid environment to be resolved without placing Microsoft at risk.

Coordination between stakeholders also meant MDEE had to support teams with smaller engineering capabilities, empowering them to complete tasks on schedule.

Mapping the scope of impact

There are over 333,000 Microsoft 365 groups at Microsoft, 55,000 SharePoint sites, and thousands of Viva Engage communities. Planning out the migration meant closely surveying these environments to understand what might be encountered and require attention before, during, and after the migration.

• How many groups are already labeled? Whether they be sensitivity labels or AAD labels, the current environment was evaluated for labels and their classification. Roughly 86 percent of groups at Microsoft had some kind of label prior to migration.
• Do existing containers map to sensitivity labels? Since previous tags were strings of text, they did not necessarily align with the new taxonomy. To reduce confusion, existing AAD labels were mapped to Microsoft Purview Information Protection container labels.
• What were the challenges they had to overcome? Once teams in MDEE understood the labelling conventions of containers, they could better understand if an area might break due to changes.
• Which groups have exceptions? Certain users required exceptions for policies relating to specific containers. Identifying these items meant we could avoid disruptions to users with specialized needs, all without exposing valuable information.

Resolving and retiring custom solutions

Having mapped out the environment, we could then reduce our reliance on the custom tooling that scanned AAD labels to trigger security and compliance settings. From an engineering perspective, this straightforward step meant labels would no longer call an API but make calls on behalf of users to get applicable labels.

1. Remove old references.
2. Locate and update calls and permissions.
3. Ensure that anything still needing custom tooling is handled with delegate permissions.

Addressing label assignment to groups

Only group owners and global administrators can assign a label to a group directly. This posed a unique challenge for us. Custom scripts run by global administrators could change the labels of these containers, but it was estimated to take at least 27 hours, which far exceeds Microsoft’s access policy for global administrators. Adding to the challenge, the administrator’s computer would be locked down and required to stay active throughout the duration.

Having a global administrator handle these responsibilities wasn’t going to happen and giving someone global administrator status for one job was a non-starter.

This required us to develop a different solution.

Thinking through the problem, the team recognized that labels set in SharePoint through AAD will get synced back to Microsoft 365, which is also a container. Knowing this, we were able to use custom workflows to map and migrate sensitivity labels for containers through an app, instead of a group owner, without compromising security.

Develop a rollback plan

Migrating to sensitivity labels would not use deployment rings. Once the PowerShell script was executed, the environment would be transformed by the new classification system. Extensive testing was done to identify break points and what the system could handle, but we also built tools to revert to the last good state if needed.

Several scenarios were defined, and of these, key indicators and circumstances were recognized as trigger events that would necessitate a rollback. Simultaneously, certain scenarios also helped to identify if there were any points of failure that we could coexist with until a fix was put in place.

Test tenants can only reveal so much about the real environment, and the team had the data points in place to demonstrate a successful migration but having a rollback plan in place meant they could reverse course and restore Microsoft’s environment to a working state in a pinch.

Readying users

Part of our duty is to inform and educate users about new features.

Sensitivity labels not only meant new label structures and compliance practices, but introduced new concepts, like parent and child labels for containers.

Child labels already existed for documents, but AAD labels were unable to offer this kind of granular definition for containers. The combination of parent and child labels in containers required users to understand how this relationship might impact shared workspaces, especially unique situations like containers that are internally confidential and require an NDA for external users.

Previous steps, like creating consistent taxonomy and classification across labels, made it easier for users to understand the impact of new labels.

Post-deployment validation

After migrating to sensitivity labels, we carefully examined the environment to make sure our workloads interacted as expected. This included testing multiple Microsoft 365 applications, provisioning groups in Viva Engage, and making sure that the correct labels were being applied by default.

Our team also checked to make sure users, legacy applications, and custom tooling were no longer able to make groups without labels. After investigating the Microsoft 365 environment, we felt confident that we could move forward with finalizing the migration to sensitivity labels for other product partners.

Our labelling environment now supports modern productivity while keeping the company safe. Users can freely self-service new groups without accidentally violating our governance practices. Tying policy enforcement to labels transformed a reactive compliance process into a proactive model, reducing the workload on administrators and allowing us to retire several custom solutions.

• Labels now self-enforce. Users who create a group in Microsoft’s environment will now be prompted to select a label classification, which will apply the correct ruleset on creation. Sensitivity labels make tags more than just a string of descriptive text, but a way to assure compliance in a self-service environment.
• Ability to release new policies quickly. We have already created and released new policies and guiding principles, all enabled by the speed and agility surrounding sensitivity labels. Several compliance policies can be tied to sensitivity labels, which makes it easy to push and enforce rules.
• Managing the tenant is easier. Under AAD labels, changing taxonomy meant you had to re-write over string values on every group. Sensitivity labels make managing at a tenant level easier.

With sensitivity labels rolling out across Microsoft, it’s easier for users and for us to support self-service and governance at the same time.

• Learn about sensitivity labels.
• Protect documents with sensitivity labels.

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