At Microsoft, giving our employees every opportunity to thrive is critical.

Now, we have a new but familiar tool to help us do that—our very own Microsoft Viva Glint.

We’re using Viva Glint—which replaces LinkedIn Glint—to check in with our 190,000 employees, and to respond to their feedback accordingly.

We recently finished migrating our centralized, active employee listening capability to Viva Glint. As part of that, we moved our employee sentiment survey programs onto the platform, including our flagship Employee Signals program, our lifecycle surveys, and a key manager feedback survey.

We use Employee Signals to survey our employees twice per year. Our leaders, managers, and HR practitioners use the feedback to improve our work environment, to identify our strengths and improvement opportunities, and ultimately, to help our employees thrive more at work (which to us means helping them feel energized and empowered to do meaningful work).

“Employee Signals is our flagship channel for listening to our employees,” says Dante Myers, a director on the HR Business Insights (HRBI) Employee Listening team. “It’s how we mobilize our entire company to ensure all our employees can thrive.”

In July 2023, LinkedIn Glint officially became Microsoft Viva Glint as part of our Employee Experience Platform. LinkedIn Glint was a leader in the employee feedback category with a robust people-science methodology. Shifting its capabilities to Viva Glint strengthens the insights and recommendations we can deliver to our customers. With this transition, we’re rebuilding and strengthening the product, making it better adhere to our security standards while improving its reporting and admin experiences and its integration with other Microsoft products.

As Customer Zero for Microsoft, it was important for us to migrate to Viva Glint so we could start taking advantage of these enhancements when we send out our Employee Signals surveys and to improve our listening systems overall. In this story, we’ll share how we achieved this technical migration, the benefits we gained, the challenges we faced, and what learnings we can pass on to other companies that want to make the same move.

“Viva Glint helps our managers understand insights at scale,” Myers says. “They can use it to ask questions and to dive into comments that their employees have left for them.”

A boost from Viva Glint

Moving to Viva Glint has given us many advantages, including access to the power of Copilot in Viva Glint, which helps our leaders, managers and HR partners easily understand, interpret, and act on feedback we get from our employees.

Here are just a few of the benefits we’ve gained from Viva Glint and its seamless integration with Copilot and other Microsoft Viva tools:

• Faster analysis: Our employee surveys give us thousands of powerful written insights that used to require heavy amounts of manual review and analysis. Now we’re using Copilot in Viva Glint to instantly analyze these results, saving us weeks of time and increasing the ability of our leaders to draw out useful insights. Almost 5,000 of our managers used Copilot in Viva Glint after our most recent Employee Signals to dig into their results and understand employee comments.
• Deeper understanding: Our employee surveys are a great way to understand our employee sentiment, but that’s not the whole story. How our people work, collaborate, and spend their time also impacts their engagement and productivity. We used Viva Insights alongside Viva Glint to understand how our people work in meetings, after hours, during focus time, and in other specific scenarios.
• Personal growth and development tools: Viva Glint will soon come with 360 surveys that leaders and managers can use for personal growth and development (the targeted release date is August 2024). 360s were previously a separate product with LinkedIn Glint and are now included in Viva Glint.
• Advanced admin capabilities: Better and more controls in Viva Glint means we can change our ongoing survey programs as needed. Some of these new capabilities include better data ownership, question level permissions, display logic questions, and self-serve raw data exports.
• Enhanced security and privacy: Our company runs on trust and security. With the move to Viva Glint, we now have a higher level of security as the product is built on Microsoft 365 compliance standards offering enterprise-grade security, trust, privacy, and accessibility.
• Ongoing product innovation: Features like Copilot in Viva Glint are just the beginning of the innovation we’re excited for in Viva Glint. Future improvements and integrations with other Microsoft products like Viva Insights will give us more opportunities to better understand our employees, take action, and drive impact.

It’s all about giving you more tools to listen to and respond to the feedback your employees give you.

“Viva Glint provides a foundation for measuring employee satisfaction and sentiment,” says Nate Zimmer, a senior product manager on the Unified Employee Experience team in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “With the behavioral telemetry of Viva Insights, we can now see broad work patterns and combine that with the employee sentiment data from Viva Glint.”

Benefits of moving to Viva Glint

Ongoing investment and innovation, including Copilot

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Viva Glint is critical to Microsoft Viva with new features and enhancements on the roadmap with Copilot in Viva Glint for comment summarization included

Employee Lifecycle surveys included for all for all Viva Glint customers

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Viva Glint combines both Engage and Employee Lifecycle products into one platform for all customers

More impact with other viva apps

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Get a holistic view of the employee experience with Insights and Pulse.

Integrations with other Viva apps and Microsoft products drive more insights and action taking

Enhanced security and accessibility

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Built on Microsoft 365 compliance and standards offering enterprise-grade security, trust, and accessibility standards

Experience the benefits of Viva Glint: A platform that provides insights into your organization’s health and helps improve employee engagement and satisfaction.

Migration approach

We accelerated our migration from LinkedIn Glint to Viva Glint so that we could take advantage of the new functionality in private preview and thoroughly test our migration tools and processes for our customers. We learned a lot from being one of the first companies to migrate, and our experience and feedback has been incorporated into the Viva Glint Migration Toolkit.

We drove our migration with a tight partnership across our Viva Glint migration team, our Viva Glint product group, HRBI Employee Listening team, and Microsoft Digital group (our internal IT organization and experts on our internal privacy, security, and Microsoft 365 usage).

“It was important that we engaged our global tenant admins early in the migration process as they had necessary tasks in Microsoft 365 to complete for the migration,” says Erica Shepard, a senior program manager on the HR Business Insights team. “It’s recommended to engage with them four to six weeks in advance.”

Our migration involved migrating four years of survey data for over 190,000 employees. In addition to our twice annual Employee Signals, we have lifecycle surveys that are administered daily. We planned our migration window to minimize the impact on our survey programs, giving ourselves six weeks to plan and four weeks post migration before starting to program our next survey cycle. We completed numerous pre-migration tasks to prepare, including exporting reports for post-migration validation. These preparation tasks are outlined in our Migration Toolkit.

We opted not to communicate to managers and employees that we were migrating because the impact to them would be minimal, we estimated that our system would only be offline for two days. Our engineering team did extensive development and testing on our migration tools to make sure we would be fully ready to migrate our external customers in a timely, secure, and quality manner. This effort paid off for us—we were able to complete our data migration in one day and our validations in one additional day. After that, our instance of Viva Glint was fully functional with all our data migrated, which allowed our managers to start using Viva Glint two days after our migration started.

“The migration exceeded my expectations,” Shepard says. “It was completed faster than expected and we encountered zero data quality issues,” Shepard says.

Post migration, we identified a couple of challenges that we worked with our Viva Glint migration team to resolve. These were mostly resolved with user education and making some system changes. One issue involved emails not being generated and sent, which impacted our ability to send survey invitations. We discovered a custom LinkedIn Glint template that didn’t match the email template in Viva Glint—after we deleted the LinkedIn Glint template, the system reverted to the default Viva Glint email template and the issue was resolved. This solution has been added to our Viva Glint Migration Toolkit.

Another challenge we encountered was related to our survey content. While the survey content migrated, we needed to re-program our survey invitation and reminder mails because the Viva Glint email formatting didn’t allow hyperlinks, markdown syntax, or paragraphs. To solve this, we needed to get creative and adjust our approach—we shortened our overall email text to one paragraph and included vanity URLs as text strings.

Additionally, the product team resolved an issue with the Microsoft logo not downloading in the emails—we use the logo to ensure our emails didn’t look like spam to our employees. The product team also resolved an intermittent access issue where users couldn’t sign in, which was an issue related to an expired token. When we launched our reporting portal, we discovered that our customized resources didn’t migrate, and we needed to re-create them on a tight timeline. This learning has been shared with the Migration team and our solutions are now part of our Migration Toolkit.

Administering our first survey cycle

With our migration to Viva Glint complete, we pivoted to the April cycle of our Employee Signals and Manager and Leader Signals (the latter is our survey where our employees provide feedback about their managers and skip managers). We planned our migration so that we had two months to test our survey builds on Viva Glint, which gave us time to work through the above challenges with the product team.

Overall, we’re very pleased with our successful first survey cycle on Viva Glint, even with the few bumps, especially because we were able to delight our managers by launching our results portal with Copilot in Viva Glint enabled for comment summarization.

Lessons learned

Reflecting on our migration, we were extra careful and planned to revert back to LinkedIn Glint if needed. While this approach helped us plan for a potential similar experience for customers, we don’t think customers need to go that far. “Identifying your migration window and following the Viva Glint Migration Toolkit will make your migration straightforward and easy to complete,” Shepard says.

The experience our employees and managers have with Viva Glint is very similar to what they experienced with LinkedIn Glint, so we didn’t do a lot of change management with the launch. We highlighted the Copilot functionality with managers when we released results. We focused our readiness efforts on making sure our admins were familiar with their new experience in Viva Glint and supporting them through the first survey cycle.

“Give yourself time post migration to explore Viva Glint and review your platform configurations so you are set up for a smooth survey administration,” Shepard says.

We suggest migrating at least four weeks before you need to launch a big program. This allows time for you as a company admin to validate using a test program, to learn about the expanded admin experience, and to understand the new settings. The Microsoft Learn content and the Viva Glint badge program are both great ways to do this.

Here are some suggestions for your own migration to Viva Glint:

• Accelerate your migration to Viva Glint to experience the improved employee engagement platform and participate in private previews of exciting new features. You can view the latest product roadmap updates to see what’s coming next.
• Contact the Viva Glint Hotline team or your Viva Glint Customer Experience PM to discuss your migration timeline and get guidance and support throughout the process.
• Use the Viva Glint Migration Toolkit to identify deliverables and key partners and develop your project plan for a smooth migration.
• Proactively engage your IT partners who are experts in Microsoft 365, security and privacy to complete the necessary deliverables for migration.
• For Viva Glint company admins, review the Microsoft Learn content and the Viva Glint badge program content to learn about new features available in Viva Glint.

Here’s how to get started with Microsoft Viva Glint.

• Watch how Phillips 66 used Copilot in Viva Glint to summarize 14,000 employee comments in 15 seconds.
• Unpack the benefits of migrating Microsoft Viva Engage to native mode.
• Discover how we’re delivering communications internally at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Amplify.

• 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 Enhancing employee listening at Microsoft with Viva Glint appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

When Microsoft set out to move its massive internal workload of 60,000 on-premises servers to the cloud and to shutter its handful of sprawling datacenters, there was just one order from company leaders looking to go all-in on Microsoft Azure.

Please start our migration to the cloud, and quickly.

As a team, we had a lot to learn. We started with a few Azure subscriptions. We were kicking the tires, figuring things out, assessing how much work we had to do.

– Pete Apple, principal service engineer, Microsoft Digital

However, it was 2014, the early days of moving large, deeply rooted enterprises like Microsoft to the cloud. And the IT pros in charge of making it happen had few tools to do it and little guidance on how to go about it.

“As a team, we had a lot to learn,” says Pete Apple, a principal service engineer in Microsoft Digital. “We started with a few Azure subscriptions. We were kicking the tires, figuring things out, assessing how much work we had to do.”

As it turns out, quite a bit of work. More on that in a moment.

Now, seven years later, the company’s migration to the cloud is 96 percent complete and the list of lessons learned is long. Six IT datacenters are no more and there are fewer than 800 on-prem servers left to migrate. And that massive workload of 60,000 servers? Using a combination of modern engineering to redesign the company’s applications and to prune unused workloads, that number has been reduced. Microsoft is now running on 7,474 virtual machines in Azure and 1,567 virtual machines on-premises.

“What we’ve learned along the way has been rolled into the product,” Apple says. “We did go through some fits and starts, but it’s very smooth now. Our bumpy experience is now helping other companies have an easier time of it (with their own migrations).”

[Learn how modern engineering fuels Microsoft’s transformation. Find out how leaders are approaching modern engineering at Microsoft.]

The beauty of a decision framework

It didn’t start that way, but migrating a workload to Azure inside Microsoft is super smooth now, Apple says. He explains that everything started working better when they began using a decision tree like the one shown here.

Microsoft Digital’s migration to the cloud decision tree

First, the Microsoft Digital migration team members asked themselves, “Are we building an entirely new experience?” If the answer was “yes,” then the decision was easy. Build a modern application that takes full advantage of all the benefits of building natively in the cloud.

If you answer “no, we need to move an existing application to the cloud,” the decision tree is more complex. It requires the team to answer a couple of tough questions.

Do you want to take the Platform as a Service (PaaS) approach? Do you want to rebuild your experience from the ground up to take full benefit of the cloud? (Not everyone can afford to take the time needed or has the budget to do this.) Or do you want to take the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach? This requires lifting and shifting with a plan to rebuild in the future when it makes more sense to start fresh.

Tied to this question were two kinds of applications: those built for Microsoft by third-party vendors, and those built by Microsoft Digital or another team in Microsoft.

On the third-party side, flexibility was limited—the team would either take a PaaS approach and start fresh, or it would lift and shift to Azure IaaS.

“We had more choices with the internal applications,” Apple says, explaining that the team divvied those up between mission-critical and noncritical apps.

For the critical apps, the team first sought money and engineering time to start fresh and modernize. “That was the ideal scenario,” Apple says. If money wasn’t available, the team took an IaaS approach with a plan to modernize when feasible.

As a result, noncritical projects were lifted and shifted and left as-is until they were no longer needed. The idea was that they would be shut down once something new could be built that would absorb that task or die on the vine when they become irrelevant.

“In a lot of cases, we didn’t have the expertise to keep our noncritical apps going,” Apple says. “Many of the engineers who worked on them moved onto other teams and other projects. Our thinking was, if there is some part of the experience that became important again, we would build something new around that.”

Getting migration right

Apple says the Microsoft Digital migration team initially thought the migration to the cloud would be as simple as implementing one big lift-and-shift operation. It was a common mindset at the time: Take all your workloads and move them to the cloud as-is and figure out the rest later.

“That wasn’t the best way, for a number of reasons,” he says, adding that there was a myriad of interconnections and embedded systems to sort out first. “We quickly realized our migration to the cloud was going to be far more complex than we thought.”

After a lot of rushing around, the team realized it needed to step back and think more holistically.

The first step was to figure out exactly what they had on their hands—literally. Microsoft had workloads spread across more than 10 datacenters, and no one was tracking who owned all of them or what they were being used for (or if they were being used at all).

Longtime Microsoft culture dictated that you provision whatever you thought you might need, and to go big to make sure you covered your worst-case scenario. Once the upfront cost was covered, teams would often forget about how much it cost to keep all those servers running. With teams spinning up production, development, and test environments, the amount of untracked capacity was large and always growing.

“Sometimes, they didn’t even know what servers they were using,” Apple says. “We found people who were using test environments to run their main services.”

And figuring out who was paying for what? Good luck.

“There was a little bit of cost understanding, of what folks were thinking they had versus what they were paying for, that we had to go through,” Apple says. “Once you move to Azure, every cost is accounted for—there is complete clarity around everything that you’re paying for.”

There were some surprising discoveries.

“Why are we running an entire Exchange Server with only eight people using it? That should be on Office 365,” Apple says. “There were a lot of ‘let’s find an alternative and just retire it’ situations that we were able to work through. It was like when you open your storage facility from three years ago and suddenly realize you don’t need all the stuff you thought you needed.”

Moving to the cloud created opportunities to do many things over.

“We were able to clean up many of our long-running sins and misdemeanors,” Apple says. “We were able to fix the way firewalls were set up, lock down our ExpressRoute networks, and (we) tightened up access to our Corpnet. Moving to the cloud allowed us to tighten up our security in a big way.”

Essentially, it was a greenfield do-over opportunity.

“We didn’t do it enough, but when we did it the right way, it was very powerful,” says Heather Pfluger. She is a partner group manager on Microsoft Digital’s Platform Engineering Team, who had a front-row seat during the migration.

That led to many mistakes, which makes sense because the team was trying to both learn a new technology and change decades of ingrained thinking.

“We did dumb things,” Pfluger says. “We definitely lifted and shifted into some financial challenges, we didn’t redesign as we should have, and we didn’t optimize as we should have.”

All those were learning moments, she says. She points to how the team now uses an optimization dashboard to buy only what it needs. It’s a change that’s saving Microsoft millions of dollars.

Apple says those new understandings are making a big difference all over the company.

“We had to get people into the mindset that moving to the cloud creates new ways to do things,” he says. “We’re resetting how we run things in a lot of ways, and it’s changing how we run our businesses.”

He rattled off a long list of things the team is doing differently, including:

• Sending events and alerts straight to DevOps teams versus to central IT operations
• Spinning up resources in minutes for just the time needed. (Versus having to plan for long racking times or VMs that used to take a week to manually build out.)
• Dynamically scale resources up and down based upon load
• Resizing month-to-month or week-to-week based upon cyclical business rhythms versus using the old “continually running” model
• Having some solutions costs drop to zero or near zero when idle
• Moving from custom Windows operating system image for builds to using Azure gallery image and Azure automation to update images
• Creating software defined networking configurations in the cloud versus physical networked firewalled configurations that required many manual steps
• Managing on premises environments with Azure tools

There is so much more we can do now. We don’t want our internal users to find problems with our reporting. We want to find them ourselves and fix them so fast that our employee users never notice anything was wrong.

– Heather Pfluger, partner group manager, Platform Engineering Team

Pfluger’s team builds the telemetry tools Microsoft employees use every day.

“There is so much more we can do now,” she says, explaining that the goal is always to improve satisfaction. “We don’t want our internal users to find problems with our reporting. We want to find them ourselves and fix them so fast that our employee users never notice anything was wrong.”

And it’s starting to work.

“We’ve gotten to the point where our employee users discovering a problem is becoming more rare,” Pfluger says. “We’re getting better, but we still have a long way to go.”

Apple hopes everyone continues to learn, adjust, and find better ways to do things.

“All of our investments and innovations are now all occurring in the cloud,” he says. “The opportunity to do new and more powerful things is just immense. I’m looking forward to seeing where we go next.”

• Learn how modern engineering fuels Microsoft’s transformation.
• Find out how leaders are approaching modern engineering at Microsoft.

The post Boosting Microsoft’s migration to the cloud with Microsoft Azure appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft has migrated its internal Human Resources portal to the cloud, a key step in its ongoing companywide digital transformation. Called HRweb, the portal is the second busiest at Microsoft, and represents the last major internal employee portal to move to the cloud. The migration has transformed the experience the company’s employees have when they engage with HR.

The move from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint Online created many improvements, including serving up smarter personalized information to employees and delivering better search results, says Jay Clem, general manager of Industry Solutions in Microsoft Digital.

“Shortly before I joined the group, plans were in place to move from SharePoint on-premises to SharePoint Online,” Clem says. “It was largely a technology transition, but we knew that, for employees to have the best experience possible, we also needed to change core business processes in HR.”

The shift wasn’t without challenges.

The first attempt to move to the cloud was two and a half years ago. The team had scoped the move but was closely watching two HR services that had just launched that were not performing as well as expected. In addition, the team’s plan to copy the existing HRweb portal to SharePoint Online using a “lift and shift” model wasn’t robust as it needed be across multiple devices, and it didn’t do enough to take advantage of the benefits of moving to SharePoint Online. For those reasons, a decision was made to call off the migration and go back to the drawing board.

“Today the story is different,” says Rajamma Krishnamurthy, a principal group program manager on the Microsoft Digital Human Resources team. “This time we were fully prepared, and the technology was ready and capable.”

The Human Resources IT function is more robust, and procedures for moving internal portals to SharePoint Online have matured, she says, pointing to several other internal portals successfully making the move to SharePoint Online. Additionally, the connection between Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT group, and the Human Resources function is tighter.

There were several technical reasons why the just-finished migration went so well, but there is also a more simple, human reason. “The difference was Joseph,” Krishnamurthy says.

Joseph is Joseph Jassey, Director Industry Digital Strategy – Industry Solutions in Microsoft Digital who not only led the HRweb migration, along with Cameron Thompson and the Human Resources team, but built it from the ground up, gaining key support from everyone involved well before the actual migration started.

“Joseph, Cameron, and the team have worked long and hard to leverage our SharePoint Online platform for HRweb,” says Andrew Winnemore, a general manager of human services for Human Resources.
For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEQrRhVJp9w, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

Getting it rightA natural storyteller, Jassey led the migration in his own unique way.“When I came on board, I was hired specifically for this,” Jassey says. “They said, ‘Here is our portal, we want to move to the cloud, we have 90,000 global employees using this every month, can you help us do this?’The first thing Jassey did was figure out why the migration didn’t work the first time.

“You’re not just dealing with the technical aspects of it, you also need to look at the culture, about why we do things the way we do them—why people weren’t ready for the move.”

As Jassey dug in, he learned the migration was cancelled for a variety of reasons: a website that was overly complex, a host of technical challenges, a business group that was wary due to a recent bumpy roll-out, and hesitation from internal leadership for such a wholesale shift. There were tactical challenges as well, including uncertainty around using lift and shift to move the entire site “as is,” concerns that performance would be slower in the cloud, questions around search functionality, and rising security standards.

Along with a series of personal interviews across teams, Jassey benchmarked with portals that had been successful, including the IT and legal sites, which had just finished their own migrations. After a tour of the Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) portal, he liked what he saw, and brought those lessons back to HR.

The Human Resources Microsoft Digital leadership team loved seeing the CELA success story. With their interest piqued, Jassey asked for a proof of concept—nothing big, just something that dabbled in what was possible. “I told them, ‘This is how we want to approach this,’” Jassey says. “We can start small and see how it can be done.’”

Jassey drove moving a section of HRweb documentation to the cloud, sending a small amount of real, representative information. It worked, and Jassey then asked to move the full website in the same way. “I wanted them to feel confident, and that it was easy,” he says.

The original migration was built around a “lift and shift” approach, which called for copying everything on premises on SharePoint 2010 directly to SharePoint Online. The prevailing thinking suggested that most of the work was done two and half years ago—why not just pick that up and run with it?

But there were concerns with that approach. “I felt that would put us in the same structure as before, and I didn’t think it would give us the opportunity to rethink everything. From my research and conversations, I felt we needed a fresh start, new thinking, to push through it—I knew it could be done.”

Asking ‘why not?’

Jassey, who mentors kids who immigrate to the US from his native Gambia, is always encouraging everyone he meets to get out of their comfort zone, and the HRweb migration to SharePoint Online was no different.

“A growth mindset—that’s when you feel uncomfortable, that’s when you grow,” he says.

For the kids, it means encouraging them to consider careers in technology. For the Microsoft employees who worked on the HRweb migration, it was encouraging them to feel safe starting from scratch.

By starting over, the team was able to fix many existing problems like simplifying content, reducing subsites (moving from 398 subsites down to just 12), and simplifying security. The team was also able to make the employee experience more personal.

The result is a site, by early reviews, that is winning accolades from both employees and HR.

“It’s been a real joy to watch how the team has worked together to get us to this point,” Winnemore says. “Moving to the cloud is helping us build a first-class employee experience and modernize our HR systems and processes.”

For his part, Jassey says the human component cannot be underestimated. Having a dedicated, flexible team that was willing to try innovative approaches working on the project was the key differentiator.

• Explore upgrading Microsoft’s core Human Resources system with SAP SuccessFactors
• Discover how Microsoft’s HR portal gets personal, thanks to the modern experience in SharePoint
• Read more about shining a light on how Microsoft manages Shadow IT

The post Microsoft moves its Human Resources employee portal to SharePoint Online appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Now that it has finished “lifting and shifting” its massive internal workload to Microsoft Azure, the company is rethinking everything.

“We’re rearchitecting all of our applications so that they work natively on Azure,” says Ludovic Hauduc, corporate vice president of Core Platform Engineering in Microsoft Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO). “We’re retooling to take advantage of all that the cloud has to offer.”

Microsoft spent the last five years moving the internal workload of its 60,000 on-premises servers to Azure. Thanks to early efforts to modernize some of that workload while migrating it, and to ruthlessly removing everything that wasn’t being used, the company is now running about 6,500 virtual machines in Azure. This number dynamically scales up to around 11,000 virtual machines when the company is processing extra work at the end of months, quarters, and years. It still has about 1,500 virtual machines on premises, most of which are there intentionally. The company is now 97 percent in the cloud.

Now that the company’s cloud migration is done and dusted, it’s Hauduc’s job to craft a framework for transforming Microsoft into a born-in-the-cloud company. CSEO will then use that framework to retool all the applications and services that the organization uses to provide IT and operations services to the larger company.

The job is bigger than building a guide for how the company will rebuild applications that support Human Resources, Finance, and so on. Hauduc’s team is creating a roadmap for how Microsoft will rearchitect those applications in a consistent, connected way that focuses on the end user experience while also figuring out how to get the more than 3,000 engineers in CSEO who will rebuild those applications to embrace the modern engineering–fueled cultural shift needed for this transformation to happen.

[Take a deep dive into how Hauduc and his team in CSEO are using a cloud-centric mindset to drive the company’s transformation. Find out more about how CSEO is using a modern-engineering mindset to engineer solutions inside Microsoft.]

Move to the cloud creates transformation opportunity

Despite good work by good people, CSEO’s engineering model wasn’t ready to scale to the demands of Microsoft’s growth and how fast its internal businesses were evolving. Moving to the cloud created the perfect opportunity to fix it.

“In the past, every project we worked on was delivered pretty much in isolation,” Hauduc says. “We operated very much as a transaction team that worked directly for internal customers like Finance and HR.”

CSEO engineering was done externally through vendors who were not connected or incentivized to talk to each other. They would take their orders from the business group they were supporting, build what was asked for, get paid, and move on to the next project.

“We would spin up a new vendor team and just get the project done—even if it was a duplication or a slight iteration on top of another project that already had been delivered,” he says. “That’s how we ended up with a couple of invoicing systems, a few financial reporting systems, and so on and so forth.”

Lack of a larger strategy prevented CSEO from building applications that made sense for Microsoft employees.

This made for a rough user experience.

“Each application had a different look and feel,” Hauduc says. “Each one had its own underlying structure and data system. Nothing was connected and data was replicated multiple times, all of which would create challenges around privacy, security, data freshness, etc.”

The problem was simple—the team wasn’t working against a strategy that let it push back at the right moments.

“The word that the previous IT organization never really used was ‘no,’” Hauduc says. “They felt like they had no choice in the matter.”

When moving to the cloud opens the door to transformation

The story is different today. Now CSEO has its own funding and is choosing which projects to build based on a strategic vision that outlines where it wants to take the company.

“The conversation has completely shifted, not only because we have moved things to the cloud, but because we have taken a single, unified data strategy,” Hauduc says. “It has altered how we engage with our internal customers in ways that were not possible when everything was on premises and one-off.”

Now CSEO engineers are working in much smarter ways.

“We now have agility around operating our internal systems that we could never have fathomed achieving on prem,” he says. “Agility from the point of view of elasticity, from the point of view of releases, of understanding how our workloads are being used and deriving insights from these workloads, but also agility from the point of view of reacting and adapting to the changing needs of our internal business partners in an extremely rapid manner because we have un-frictioned access to the data, to the signals, and to the metrics that tell us whether we are meeting the needs of our internal customers.”

And those business groups who unknowingly came and asked for something CSEO had already built?

“We now have an end-to-end view of all the work we’re doing across the company,” Hauduc says. “We can correlate, we can match the patterns of issues and problems that our other internal customers have had, we can show them what could happen if they don’t change their approach, and best of all, we can give them tips for improving in ways they never considered.”

CSEO’s approach may have been flawed in the past, but there were lots of good reasons for that, Hauduc says. He won’t minimize the work that CSEO engineers did to get Microsoft to the threshold of digitally transforming and moving to the cloud.

“The skills and all of the things that made us successful as an IT organization before we started on a cloud journey are great,” he says. “They’re what contributed to building the company and operating the company the way we have today.”

But now it’s time for new approaches and new thinking.

“The skills that are required to run our internal systems and services today in the cloud, those are completely different,” he says.

As a result, the way the team operates, the way it interacts, and the way it engages with its internal customers have had to evolve.

“The cultural journey that CSEO has been on is happening in parallel with our technical transformation,” Hauduc continues. “The technical transformation and the cultural transformation could not have happened in isolation. They had to happen in concert, and to a large extent, they fueled each other as we arrived at what we can now articulate as our cloud-centric architecture.”

And about that word that people in CSEO were afraid to say? They’re saying it now.

“The word ‘no’ is now a very powerful word,” Hauduc says. “When a customer request comes in, the answer is ‘yes, we’ll prioritize it,’ or ‘no, this isn’t the most important thing we can build for the company from a ROI standpoint, but here’s what we can do instead.’”

The change has been empowering to all of CSEO.

“The quality and the shape of the conversation has changed,” he says. “Now we in CSEO are uniquely positioned to take a step back and say, ‘for the company, the most important thing for us to prioritize is this, let’s go deliver on it.’”

Take a deep dive into how Hauduc and his team in CSEO are using a cloud-centric mindset to drive the company’s transformation.

Find out more about how CSEO is using a modern-engineering mindset to engineer solutions inside Microsoft.

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