The New Microsoft is One Microsoft

While I am an employee of Microsoft, the views expressed here are those of the author's only and based on my career experiences.

The new Microsoft is not the same as the legacy Microsoft. It's difficult to get the point across without sounding like marketing copy, but this comes through in the technology, the approach and the mission.

More than lip service, Microsoft's mission reveals a seismic shift in our approach. The focus has moved from us ("a PC on every desk and in every home") to you. This surfaced during SuperBowl LIII in the great work being done to empower everyone to play Xbox.

This spirit is in everything we do, including enterprise solutions. While many businesses use Windows, Office, SQL and Windows Server, there is now much more to the story than these institutional stacks, and it involves our focus in empowering customers on their Digital Transformation journey.

I created this graphic to show how I view the One Microsoft Customer Journey:

The journey is enabled through technology, but requires a cultural shift and engagement by your employees and leadership. Companies can start anywhere on the path depending on the need. at Microsoft, leveraging One Microsoft like blocks, starting with commodity and building towards Digital Transformation. This motion is presented in a linear manner, but again, you can start anywhere!

Let's look at leveraging One Microsoft like building blocks, starting with commodity and building towards Digital Transformation. This motion is presented in a linear manner, but again, you can start anywhere!

Commodity Services

Enterprise technology has followed a 3-5 year refresh cycle for the past 20 years.

While the technology that runs desktops, email, identity and file services were revolutionary decades ago, these have become basic commodities.

This became clear when Microsoft built FastTrack as a licensing benefit. This free service assists with the enablement of cloud identities and the initial cloud configurations and will even perform the migration of email and files to the cloud (pending pre-requisites, of course).

It is clear in IT organizations as well. When faced with a week long Exchange outage several years ago due to a hardware failure, my CIO told me this was the last time. He made the decision to go to Office 365. The reason wasn't tied to some email feature not available on-premises, it was to offload the responsibility of infrastructure management and protection (commodities) to Microsoft.

Modernizing these commodities are fundamental: email (Exchange Online), file sharing (SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business), identity (Azure AD), the operating system/productivity tools (Windows 10 and Office Pro Plus) and the devices (Surface).

Interesting things will start to happen once commodities are in the cloud as new features become unlocked. For example, leveraging your productivity tools with file sharing in the cloud enables co-authoring, which reduces email volume and file sprawl.

IT will start getting out of the day to day management of these systems, freeing up their time to increase productivity across the organization.

Another consideration here is all that legacy IT technical debt lying around in the data center. There are two choices here. First, you can break the hardware refresh cycle and migrate up to the cloud under IaaS. This will work for a while and likely will get you past the next time your hardware requires an upgrade. To really take advantage of the cloud though, those applications will need to be modernized.

Microsoft has even commoditized the movement of servers between on-premises and Azure, leveraging Azure Migrate or Azure Site Recovery. This is a simple, commodity place to start getting your company going in the cloud. Of course, many companies skip all the way ahead to business value and start new, modern workloads directly in the cloud. That works too!

Increase Productivity

For years, email has been the primary method for communication in organizations. This is one reason so many organizations are crushed by it. The reality is different types of communications belong in different channels. Let's use the blocks we've set on commodity services to increase productivity by getting conversations where they belong.

Realtime collaboration through chat, audio and video sharing is a viral way to dramatically shift a company's communications. Microsoft Teams is the building block here, backed by three commodity services already turned on - Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. Administrators can see how the pieces fit together, but for employees, it is one seamless experience.

With SharePoint Online already enabled for files, employees can start building their own team sites and intranets for focused information gathering and sharing. Employees can take on the creation and management of their own sites through the low code/no code interface.

Now that productivity is increasing and a good buzz is generating across the organization, it is a great time for the executives to engage. For executive engagement and more informal social media collaboration, spin up Yammer and start recording company broadcasts with Teams Live Events and Stream. These tools give everyone a voice by bringing broad conversations into focus quickly, while allowing executives to easily share their thoughts and take the pulse of the culture.

Employees will now start using the tools that makes the most sense to their daily workflows and team dynamics.

The graphic above explains where the technology intersects with the Inner Loop (people you work with regularly) and the Outer Loop (people you connect with across your organization).

As employees interact with the platform and each other, signals around how they work are analyzed and surfaced back to help them work better through MyAnalytics. This tool once told me that a co-worker and I were spending too much time together in the same meetings and that we should divide and conquer. It was a game-changing insight and shifted our behavior to make us more productive! For Human Resources, this type of information can be a huge benefit as the signals around productivity can be give broad insights into the mental health of the workforce (not individuals).

As productivity increases, it becomes evident that the integration of these tools is what facilitates the improvement.

Security Side Note:

The Security Team will likely come knocking on your door as they see progress. Microsoft has built security into the platform with features such as conditional access, content protection, data loss prevention, cloud app security, cloud based device management and more. You might have started with parity level protections while rolling out commodities, but this stage is where more mature security is typically layered on. With this new take on security, roll out all these tools on mobile devices to increase productivity even more!

Another thing may be surfacing around this time. If your company has started moving servers into the cloud in IaaS, cost control may be cropping up. This is the time to start looking at DevOps and modernizing your apps to dramatically lower the cost of compute.

Empowering Employees

What might start out looking like a baby learning to crawl, business units are going to start digitizing their processes into what has been deployed. At first, there will be stumbles, but the next building blocks will give them the power to go beyond digitization and improve and automate business processes and analyze data.

Through a series of low code/no code tools in the Power Platform, employees can automate workflows and tasks, create new applications that work with data on their terms, and analyze that data through rich dashboards.

Where commodity services gave IT more time to be efficient, these tools give business units and individual contributors more time to be efficient.

For example, a team that today tracks expenses in spreadsheets can write a PowerApp for a mobile device that allows employees to log their expenses, which updates a spreadsheet. A Flow can be kicked off to send an approval to the manager with another Flow sending the spreadsheet to accounting. Both PowerApps and Flow are low code/no code solutions, giving everyone the power to create a solution.

Let's take the expense reporting a step further. By compiling spreadsheets together, accounting can analyze expenses using a dashboard in more real-time (shortly after they are logged vs. on a monthly basis).

Expenses are just a high level example, imagine what could be done with customer service or customer requests. The business side will have these questions and likely drive a conversation around Dynamics. Since we're talking One Microsoft, Dynamics fits in with all of the aforementioned solutions (as will other non-Microsoft standalone apps through the Common Data Service and Data Connectors).

Things are really starting to come together!

Digital Transformation and Business Value

Your business is unique because of its culture and processes. What will make your business unique in the coming years is how you leverage technology to empower your employees, engage your customers, optimize your operations and transform your products.

At this stage, it is back to differentiation and what makes your company truly unique. This is where the real power of the cloud comes in.

A business can leverage the cloud to customize the deployed solutions closer to the business, allowing for the technology to work in concert with the way your business runs. Azure is where this happens.

Many companies will start with IaaS in Azure and then move to more modular and modern ways of running applications. In the context of building blocks however, there is a breadth of cloud services to augment what's come before. DevOps, artificial intelligence and machine learning, bots, LogicApps, functions, big data, and more will create a digital feedback loop, built on what you've already deployed. This is also where we find edge devices and new experiences, like Azure Sphere and Kinect (IoT) and Hololens.

If commodity services free up IT's time and Power Tools free up a business unit and individual contributor's time, Azure frees up time across the company and your customers, delivering real value.

The possibilities are too vast to outline here, but here is an example. A bank could layer on AI to monitor a customer's transactions. When the customer service system in Dynamics detects and validates a customer service call, the AI can make recommendations based on the latest transactions, attempting to predict the resolution. Data can be pulled out of Dynamics, the call logs and social media, put into a model, and analyzed for customer sentiment and effectiveness. The results can be added to a reporting dashboard for marketing to view and analyze, resulting in impacts across all four areas: customers, employees, operations and products.

And finally, we have delivered real business value. Not surprisingly, some companies see this potential, will start at this last step to solve a real business problem as their first foray into more agile processes.

The End

What's fascinating about this journey is that as the technology goes from commodity to business value, so does the Microsoft relationship.

You will see changes as your Microsoft Account Team goes from a license renewal cycle to bringing in industry teams and technical specialists that uncover competitive advantages, reveal industry trends, and help your business grow. In fact, these are things they are likely trying to do today by asking to meet with business leaders!

And so, we're back to where we started, with Microsoft's mission. As Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, put it at MWC 2019:

"Today, every company is a tech company and every organization will need to build its own technical capability to compete and grow and prosper. The next big tech breakthrough, the next advancement that will transform our lives will come, not just from another technology company, but from a retailer, or a healthcare provider or an auto manufacturer…Not to become dependent on Microsoft, but to become independent with Microsoft."

I'd love to hear about your challenges and successes in the comments!

About Matthew Sekol:

Matthew Sekol is an Account Technology Strategist at Microsoft in Financial Services. With a degree from Penn State in English and a mix of creativity, he has a unique perspective on life, business and technology.

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The views expressed here are those of the author's only and not Microsoft's.