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.

We’re transitioning from traditional network performance monitoring to a powerful integration between AppNeta by Broadcom Software and Azure Monitor. This strategic shift allows us to focus on what truly matters—the user experience we offer our employees.

As our networking infrastructure has evolved to embrace and depend upon cloud services, so have the expectations of our employees. Our network extends across thousands of on-premises and cloud resources and stretches to 160 countries across the world.

[Explore the rest of our series on moving our network to the cloud.]

Our network monitoring must always answer the important questions for our business and the Microsoft employees that drive that business. Our organization’s needs come from diverse perspectives and use-case scenarios, and they include essential questions our monitoring must answer, including:

“How do I understand and optimize the performance of my resources?”

“Are my resources available and redundant?”

“Can I diagnose problems end-to-end?”

“Does network configuration comply with security policies and ensure it’s in the desired state?”

“How can I use data to predict behavior and outcomes?”

“How is the network experience impacted after a change is implemented?”

In all these questions, lie answers that revolve around our employees’ user experience. What are the people who use our network infrastructure experiencing, and how can we better measure and improve that experience?

We realized that conventional network performance monitoring—monitoring the systems and infrastructure that support our network—could only tell part of the story. To truly understand and meet our requirements, we needed to monitor user experiences directly. This understanding became the driving force behind our decision to embrace user-experience monitoring.

The lifecycle of our hybrid cloud networking environment dictates how we observe and measure the end-to-end experience in our network environment. Across our network environment, multiple factors impact the user experience.

Network resources must be healthy and available. Resources and network paths must meet performance requirements for throughput and latency. Network configuration must meet standards and be protected from configuration drift. Resources must be adequately inventoried and backed up.

The broader picture of network state must be integrated with related data to provide a holistic perspective of the user experience.

We use AppNeta by Broadcom Software to bridge our cloud monitoring capabilities into our on-premises corporate network and capture the end-to-end network experience for our employees, whether connected from home, a customer’s office, or one of our Microsoft office locations worldwide. AppNeta allows us to observe the entire corporate network experience and integrate that monitoring data with observations from Azure Monitor for our cloud networking environment.

We’re integrating the user experience across our office locations and on-premises network infrastructure into a global cloud network environment hosted in Azure. Our cloud network is at the core of connectivity for Microsoft, with our Azure-based VWAN connecting our entire global network.

This monitoring solution allows us to track and analyze various user-centric metrics precisely, from application responsiveness to service availability and beyond. We can proactively identify potential issues before they impact our users, take targeted actions, and optimize the user experience to ensure seamless interactions between our users and services.

We currently monitor more than 500 network-specific Azure resources, including Virtual Networks, Azure Firewalls, IP groupings, ExpressRoute circuits, ExpressRoute Gateways, VPN Gateways, Azure VWAN Hubs, and Azure VWAN Global Reach.

Across these cloud resources and into on-premises resources using integration with AppNeta, we’re tracking almost 50 parameters—native and synthetic—including simple metrics such as throughput, CPU utilization, packet loss, and latency. These parameters also include more complex and holistic measures such as the provisioning state of resources, resource status, data path availability, configuration drift, and rule changes.

These metrics are combined using dashboards and workbooks in Azure Monitor, creating a hop-by-hop measure of visibility, performance, configuration, resiliency, and interoperability for user experiences.

By integrating AppNeta with Azure Monitor, we’re creating a holistic view of the end-to-end user experience. AppNeta’s on-premises monitoring capabilities, combined with Azure Monitor’s rich telemetry data and reporting, allow us to comprehensively understand how our users interact with our services.

Our transition to user-experience monitoring has created numerous benefits. Prioritizing our users’ needs results in more satisfied and empowered employees. Real-time insights into user interactions allow us to address issues promptly, leading to reduced downtime and improved service reliability. Our focus on user experience strengthens our relationship with the employees we support and positions us as an employee-centric organization.

Our journey to network monitoring in the cloud is ongoing and ever evolving. The integration between AppNeta and Azure Monitor sets the stage for continuous growth and improvement for our network environment and organization.

We’re currently working on building self-healing capabilities into our monitoring solution using Azure-based automation tools. We’re taking a more proactive approach to the health of our network, and automation ensures that self-healing capabilities can be deployed consistently and efficiently across the entire network.

We’re also moving toward Azure Data Lake for data lake and data lakehouse capabilities, increasing the flexibility of our reporting and dashboarding while ensuring adequate performance for the monitoring solution as demand and workload increase.

Our transition from traditional network performance monitoring to integrated user-experience monitoring with AppNeta and Azure Monitor represents our dedication to user satisfaction. By directly understanding our employees’ experiences, we can exceed their expectations and ensure seamless interaction with our services.

In this transformative journey with AppNeta and Azure Monitor as our allies, we’re well-equipped to embrace a user-centric outlook where monitoring excellence translates into unparalleled user experiences. We’ll continue prioritizing user satisfaction as the driving force behind our monitoring strategy.

Here are some considerations for moving towards a more cloud-based, user-centric networking infrastructure.

• Extend your global network with robust monitoring solutions. A robust monitoring solution like ours can effectively manage vast and diverse infrastructures.
• Directly monitor user experiences for better network performance. The integration of AppNeta provides a comprehensive understanding of network performance and user interaction across various environments.
• Proactively identify and resolve issues in your network. Using integrated monitoring tools enables you to detect potential issues before they impact users, enhancing service reliability and minimizing downtime.
• Track comprehensive metrics for a holistic network understanding. By monitoring comprehensive metrics, you can gain a detailed and holistic view of your network’s performance, aiding in more informed decision-making.
• Embrace future-oriented developments for your network management. Self-healing capabilities and Azure Data Lake adoption highlight the importance of continuous improvement and adapting to evolving network needs.
• Adopt an employee-centric approach for organizational success. Prioritizing user experience strengthens your position as an employee-centric organization. Focusing on user satisfaction can lead to broader organizational success.

Find special offers, benefits, and incentives to help you migrate to Azure, optimize costs, learn new skills, and grow your business.

• Explore the rest of our series on moving our network to the cloud.
• Unpack the learnings, pitfalls, and compromises of Microsoft’s expedition to the cloud.
• Discover engineering a Zero Trust network at Microsoft.

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 Focusing on user-experience network monitoring with AppNeta and Azure Monitor appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Technical professionals are increasingly responsible for supporting adoption activities and helping their organizations ensure they’re maximizing their tech investments and making important technology decisions. As a result of these trends, a new category of role is springing up within and alongside IT departments: the technology decision influencer (TDI).

To support their work, we designed the Experience insights dashboard, a new feature for the Microsoft 365 admin center that’s now available as a public preview for our customers. It provides crucial insights for TDIs across product usage, feedback, views on help articles, and more.

Within Microsoft, the dashboard is helping our change management professionals understand how employees use Microsoft 365, their pain points, and where they need support. As a result, we’re driving more streamlined, effective, compliant usage across our organization.

[Read more about a foundation for modern collaboration: Microsoft 365 bolsters teamwork. Discover how Microsoft used change management best practices to launch a new business intelligence platform. Explore how Microsoft enables a modern support experience. Unpack how Microsoft communicates with employees directly using Teams.]

Connecting IT and business through technology decision influencers

The rise of the TDI is closely linked to rapid changes in the working world. Fast-moving digital transformation combined with the move to hybrid work and the consumerization of IT mean that technical professionals are responsible for going the extra mile to empower users. They help employees do more with less, create a positive experience for users, and ensure their companies get the most out of their IT investments.

At their core, TDI roles are about empowering users to find the best technology to meet their needs while ensuring their tools are secure, compliant, cost-efficient, and as simple as possible for IT to manage. Those outcomes largely rely on using their technology properly and effectively.

“When people aren’t using the whole experience, it can make them dissatisfied with the product,” says Amisha Bhatia, principal product manager for Microsoft 365 admin center. “Sometimes you have to train people how to use a tool properly for them to really start maximizing its benefits.”

But to help employees get the full benefit of the technology they use while influencing organizational technology investments, TDIs need the right kinds of data. That includes usage behaviors, feedback, and even the kinds of support material users access when they’re having trouble.

“Your Microsoft 365 tenant is a great source of information about the actions users take every day, but we need to balance a respect for privacy with making that data easily accessible,” says David Johnson, principal program manager architect with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, our internal IT organization. “Abstracting user data up from those individual actions is incredibly valuable because it helps adoption specialists identify where we need to scale as a tenant and what divisions they need to support.”

We saw an opportunity to make that data available for Microsoft 365 users through the Experience insights dashboard.

Insights that influence decisions and enable adoption

The Experience insights dashboard represents the recognition of IT’s changing role and how administrative features can support it. Previously, administrative tools were purely focused on deployment and configuration—a way for IT teams to keep the lights on for organizations.

With the change we’re seeing over the last couple of years in these more prominent TDI roles, we’re building Microsoft 365 admin center experiences that expand on IT’s new and evolving responsibilities.

—Amisha Bhatia, principal product manager, Microsoft 365 admin center

Experience insights is the key to a whole new model. It enables three core functions for TDIs:

• User experience: Understanding Microsoft 365 experience data to find opportunities and value
• IT training: Training employees to use technology more efficiently
• Adoption strategy: Setting adoption strategies and rollout plans

This dashboard is accessible through either the Microsoft 365 admin center or a Teams app. It shows TDIs data across usage, sentiment, and support to give them a complete view of their organization’s experience with Microsoft 365. It even introduces a new level of admin access tailored to their roles: the user experience success manager.

“With the change we’re seeing over the last couple of years in these more prominent TDI roles, we’re building Microsoft 365 admin center experiences that expand on IT’s new and evolving responsibilities,” Bhatia says.

The Experience insights dashboard lets change management professionals drill down into specific information that helps them identify opportunities to improve users’ engagement with Microsoft 365 products and experiences. It provides four overarching data categories for TDIs that they can view across different divisions within an organization:

• Active usage: Overall data on product and experience usage that TDIs can break down by individual product features (available in some products)
• In-product feedback: Unsolicited feedback that users volunteer within the apps they use
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey response rates: Feedback through solicited in-product surveys
• Help article views: The specific articles users view when they access support.microsoft.com or in-app help experiences

Each of these data categories provides an essential piece of the puzzle for TDIs to encourage healthy Microsoft 365 adoption and advise decision makers on an organization’s overall technology strategy.

The unification of data across sources and signals is very important for roles that traditionally haven’t had access to the Microsoft 365 admin center.

—Amy Ceurvorst, success specialist, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

Empowering change management professionals in a rich technology ecosystem

Now that TDIs are no longer reliant on data they request piecemeal from their IT colleagues, they can conduct the kind of research that leads to deep organizational insights. At Microsoft, it’s revolutionizing how we handle change management. And at the heart of that revolution are our success strategists and adoption specialists.

“The unification of data across sources and signals is very important for roles that traditionally haven’t had access to the Microsoft 365 admin center,” says Amy Ceurvorst, success specialist with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. “It’s opened up our eyes to all new types of data we can use in our roles.”

A success specialist’s workflow frequently starts with a question about app usage. For example, they might observe that a particular tool is underutilized in their organization compared to others. They can then isolate that tool and drill down through the usage data to determine which features are most or least helpful for the organization’s employees.

As an IT organization, it’s easy to lose the forest through the trees. By abstracting individual actions and looking at what drives behavioral changes across a company, you’re refocusing on the forest.

—David Johnson, principal program manager architect, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

From there, they can see what users are saying through in-product feedback channels. Meanwhile, investigating the support articles the organization’s employees access the most provides insights into the issues they encounter in their day-to-day.

All this data equips a success specialist to provide appropriate training and communication to help organizations adopt apps more thoroughly or get the most out of their experiences by optimizing usage. Their efforts help boost productivity and improve engagement. The tool also gives TDIs the ability to advise decision makers about technology decisions with real data about employee usage and effectiveness.

“As an IT organization, it’s easy to lose the forest through the trees,” Johnson says. “By abstracting individual actions and looking at what drives behavioral changes across a company, you’re refocusing on the forest,” says David Johnson.

The Experience insights dashboard is helping our IT organization build a culture of active insights. At the same time, it means that people in primarily functional or administrative IT roles don’t have to expend energy on solely organizational or strategic concerns. That’s helpful, considering how resource-constrained most IT teams can be.

By providing TDIs with the data they need, the Experience insights dashboard is unlocking all kinds of new possibilities for organizational growth and technology adoption. We’re already accumulating valuable insights to help us build our technology strategy for upcoming fiscal years. Ultimately, it’s equipping our change management professionals with the data they need to be effective organizational partners to leaders and employees alike.

“If you’re not working on the right things, you might not have the right impact,” Ceurvorst says. “But this tool is giving the right people in the right roles the data that they need to do their jobs.”

Are you a Microsoft 365 user with over 2000 seats in your tenant? Preview the Experience insights dashboard for the Microsoft 365 admin center today.

• Identify your key change management roles—like an experience success manager—and assign them the proper permissions in the Experience insights dashboard.
• Start with high-level trends in usage, especially for your most-used products.
• If certain features are lagging, drill down into feedback, net promoter scores, and help articles.
• Understand your levers for change, including who and what influences those changes.
• Align change management with the culture of your organization.
• Recognize that driving technical change management is more than an IT concern.

• Try the Experience insights dashboard at your company.

• Read more about a foundation for modern collaboration: Microsoft 365 bolsters teamwork.
• Discover how Microsoft used change management best practices to launch a new business intelligence platform.
• Explore how Microsoft enables a modern support experience.
• Unpack how Microsoft communicates with employees directly using Teams.

The post Informing the influencers: The Microsoft 365 Experience insights dashboard empowers adoption appeared first on Inside Track Blog.