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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.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re 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:<\/p>\n
As a result, we\u2019re creating agile, regulated, and business-focused data experiences across the organization that accelerate our digital transformation.<\/p>\n
[<\/em>Unpack how we\u2019re deploying a modern data governance strategy internally at Microsoft.<\/em><\/a> Explore how we\u2019re providing modern data transfer and storage service at Microsoft with Microsoft Azure.<\/em><\/a> Discover how we\u2019re modernizing enterprise integration services at Microsoft with Microsoft Azure.<\/em><\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n Digital transformation in today\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2014precisely like the broader digital transformation they enable\u2014must also transform to meet the organization\u2019s needs.<\/p>\n The Enterprise Data team at Microsoft Digital builds and operates the systems that power Microsoft\u2019s data estate. We\u2019re 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\u2014and hopefully a starting point\u2014for enabling their enterprise data transformation.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Our data was in silos. Various parts of the organization were managing their data in different ways, and our data wasn\u2019t connected.<\/p>\n \u2014Damon Buono, head of enterprise governance, Microsoft<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n 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\u2019t provide the results or operate with the agility the business required.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cOur data was in silos,\u201d says Damon Buono, head of enterprise governance for Microsoft. \u00a0\u201cVarious parts of the organization were managing their data in different ways, and our data wasn\u2019t connected.\u201d<\/p>\n As a result, a complete perspective on enterprise-wide data wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe needed a shared data catalog to democratize data responsibly across the company,\u201d Buono says.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s lofty, aspirational state became achievable, and we immediately began creating business value.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Analytics are foundational to the remainder of the data transformation journey. Without a solid and well-established analytics foundation, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n With Microsoft Fabric<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt connects enterprise data across multiple data sources and internal organizations to create a comprehensive perspective on enterprise data,\u201d Buono says.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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\u2019s a millstone hanging around their neck. Many organizations struggle with harnessing the power of data because they don\u2019t have a data strategy and they lack alignment across the leadership teams to improve data culture.<\/p>\n In the Microsoft Digital data estate, governance lightens the load for our data owners, administrators, and users. Microsoft Purview<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe governance tools that protect and share any enterprise data are transparent to data creators, managers, and consumers,\u201d Buono says. \u201cStakeholders can be assured that their data is being shared, accessed, and used how they want it to be.\u201d<\/p>\n Our success begins with an iterative approach to data transformation. We started small, with projects that were simple to transform and didn\u2019t have a critical impact on our business.<\/p>\n \u2014Karthik Ravindran, general manager, data governance, Microsoft Security group<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cOur success begins with an iterative approach to data transformation,\u201d says Karthik Ravindran, a general manager who leads data governance for the Microsoft Security group. \u201cWe started small, with projects that were simple to transform and didn\u2019t have a critical impact on our business.\u201d<\/p>\n These early projects provided a testing ground for our methods and technology.<\/p>\n \u201cWe quickly iterated approaches and techniques, gathering feedback from stakeholders as we went, Ravindran says. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n To understand how this worked, consider the following examples of our transformation across the organization.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2014whether a seller, researcher, product manager, or marketing executive\u2014has 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\u2019s an immense swath of data consumed and managed by many teams for many purposes.<\/p>\n 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\u2019ve had with Microsoft. These engagements include the products they\u2019ve used, the trials they\u2019ve downloaded, and the conversations they\u2019ve had with other internal personas throughout their lifecycle as a Microsoft customer.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s progressive onboarding of personas and teams to use the toolset available.<\/p>\n The adoption is transforming marketing and sales across Microsoft. It\u2019s provided several benefits, including:<\/p>\n Employee experience is paramount at Microsoft. The Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team is responsible for all aspects of the employee experience. They\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s governance capabilities, which gives the Microsoft HR department the stewardship and transparency they require.<\/p>\n The enterprise data platform creates many benefits for the Employee Experiences team, including:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Governance is central to the effective democratization of data, and when data is adequately democratized\u2014safely accessible by everyone who should access it\u2014transformation is accelerated. Modern governance is achievable using automated controls and a self-service methodology, enabling immediate opportunity to create business value.<\/p>\n \u2014Damon Buono, head of enterprise governance, Microsoft<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019re accessing, and how they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n \u201cGovernance is central to the effective democratization of data, and when data is adequately democratized\u2014safely accessible by everyone who should access it\u2014transformation is accelerated,\u201d Buono says. \u201cModern governance is achievable using automated controls and a self-service methodology, enabling immediate opportunity to create business value.\u201d<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n We\u2019re 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\u2019re just getting started.<\/p>\n \u2014Karthik Ravindran, general manager, data governance, Microsoft Security group<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n We\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re 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,\u201d Ravindran says. \u201cThey are helping us rethink how we use data internally here at Microsoft, and we\u2019re just getting started.\u201d<\/p>\nAccelerating responsible digital transformation<\/h2>\n
Seizing the opportunity for data transformation<\/h3>\n
Transforming data: unify, democratize, and create value<\/h2>\n
Unifying data with an analytics foundation<\/h3>\n
![\"Buono](\"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2023\/09\/10485_Damon_Buono-271x300.jpg\")
Responsibly democratizing data with data governance<\/h3>\n
Scaling transformative outcomes with intelligent applications<\/h3>\n
How we transformed: iteration and progression<\/h2>\n
![\"Ravindran](\"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2023\/09\/10485_Karthik_Ravindran-300x271.jpg\")
Transforming marketing<\/h3>\n
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Improving the employee experience<\/h3>\n
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Creating greater sustainability in operations<\/h3>\n
Implementing internal data governance<\/h3>\n
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\nWe 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\u2019ve been able to move quickly and with agility, improving our processes as we go.<\/p>\n![\"Try](\"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2023\/07\/OKR_Try_it_out-300x68.png\")
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