Microsoft Viva - Partner Opportunity

"It's just Viva. Isn't it a configuration thing? There's no coding or building something, right? Why do I need to pay a partner organization for the implementation? My Microsoft 365 admin can set it up alright."

I have lost count of how many times I've heard this from our customers, and sometimes from our internal folks as well.

To be fair, most of Viva, Microsoft's Modern Work proposition for employee experience, is just a bunch of configuration settings on the Microsoft 365 admin portal (https://admin.microsoft.com). Once you go through the sales cycle and purchase the licenses from Microsoft, the admin user can simply add the products to your organization's users, and they will be able to start experiencing the state-of-the-art employee experience platform that Microsoft has meticulously built over the years.

There are customers doing just that. Viva Connections is the obvious first step for many of them because the licenses are included in the Microsoft 365 SKUs that the customers have already paid for. All it needs is a Sharepoint Online-based company intranet. (Of course, I'm overly simplifying the process, but that's the general idea.)

It's a similar process for Viva Insights, Viva Learning, Viva Topics, and Viva Engage as well. The pattern is exactly the same: get the licenses, assign the licenses to your users, select the options you need, and get yourself a cup of coffee while the magic unfolds in front of your eyes!

I'm sure there's somewhere a customer who has successfully executed this pattern. One such customer told me yesterday that they have no idea what to do with those licenses. The users have been granted access to Viva and the admin has done their job. Everyone on the implementation team is happy. It's just that the users haven't exactly flocked to the Viva suite of applications. There those apps are, waiting for the elusive user to step in and be amazed at all the glorious features, tools, and toys Viva has to offer. It just needs the user to take that proverbial first step and enter the "Viva" section of the organization.

But how do we entice them to do just that? It requires a change in the way the users operate. It's, whether you like it or not, a huge transformation exercise, a change management process that needs to be carefully designed, orchestrated, and executed.

“Implementing these apps is easy. Making sure the users are benefiting from these investments? That’s a whole different ballgame”

Of course, this may not be such a big deal to a small organization with dozens of employees. However, if you are a big corporate with thousands of employees spread all over the globe, this becomes a significant project in itself to change the muscle memory of your employees and convince them to use the new shiny toolset.

It is precisely for this reason that some of our biggest partners are taking an advisory-first approach to this whole paradigm of “employee experience transformation”. The digital transformation journey of any enterprise should have people as its core focus area – not the apps or the infrastructure. At the end of the day, the transformation is all about how your employees use the systems at their disposal to do more, with less effort. The systems, the apps, and the shiny toolbox we have just talked about are just levers to get there.

What we have seen is that a successful employee experience transformation journey starts with an advisory partner looking at the existing business processes and employee support functions (HR, IT, Finance etc) of the customer and suggesting how they can be streamlined and how the tools such as Microsoft Viva can help bring about that transformation. The implementation step comes much later in the engagement. Sometimes the same partner handles the implementation aspects as well. But there are many examples of an advisory partner working with a Systems Integrator to implement the agreed-upon transformation.

In this model, of course, the challenge of handholding our reluctant user to enter into the mythical Viva bar still remains and an advisory partner can help with the adoption of the new world as well. It sounds complicated because it really is. It is a multi-year journey to see the results of this transformation.

This model works better for enterprise customers than starting at the other end of the rainbow to implement Microsoft Viva and then change the processes and rules to suit the new toolset.

I hope this explains why implementing Viva is not as easy as configuring a few settings on the control panel. That just takes care of the technical aspect of it, which unfortunately is only the tip of the iceberg.

Speaking of technical aspects, a plain vanilla implementation of Viva does not take care of the required integrations for your enterprise. For instance:

• ?Viva Learning needs to talk to your chosen LMS (Learning Management System). If it is not supported out of the box by Viva, you need someone to connect the two through the published APIs.
• Viva Insights has a lot of aggregated and de-identified data that you can correlate with your customer CRM system to unearth useful insights and trends.
• Viva Connections or Viva Home is the intranet for your employees and to be most effective and useful, it needs to interact with the line of business applications and custom components your employees use day in and day out.
• Viva Topics should talk to every content repository and knowledge management system in use at your organization to surface AI powered knowledge cards about anything your employees want to find about.

Viva provides a platform for your organisation to build on. It needs to converse with all your systems to provide best value for your employees. While Viva by itself is a configuration exercise to setup, these integrations can be quite complex. For instance, in the second point above, we discussed how Viva insights and CRM data can be merged to provide deeper insights. One way of achieving this is to use the Viva Insights API to extract that dataset (de-identified and aggregated); place it in Azure Synapse; Get data from your CRM system into Synapse and merge the two datasets there – so that you can crunch this data and feed it to a visualising tool such as PowerBI which can be consumed by your CxO. This is a complex architecture that blends Microsoft 365 and Viva with Azure Data and AI platform and PowerBI. There are of course security and identity aspects that need to be taken care of.

So, does this mean that if I simply implement Viva, I cannot derive any value from that investment? Of course you can. There is a lot of features that Viva offers out of the box that can be tremendously helpful for your employees. But the magic happens when these integrations are in place. A trusted partner can help you handle this complex transformation effectively.

The possibilities are endless. It is just that we need to make sure we are entering the field through the right door.

Disclaimer: Goes without saying but these are all just my personal views, not my employer's.