Data is an invaluable asset for all businesses. Over recent years, the exponential growth of data collection and ingestion has forced most organizations to rethink their strategies for managing data. Increasing compliance requirements and ever-changing technology prevent anyone from simply leaving their enterprise data in its current state.

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.

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Tags: Azure Data and Storage, change management, Data and AI, digital transformation, Enterprise Mobility and Security, governance