Learning Objectives
- Recognize why Microsoft’s shift from boxed software to cloud services required new metrics, shared data, and a deeper understanding of customer usage and engagement.
- Examine how executive dashboards, common performance measures, and visible leadership attention helped reduce data silos and reinforce company-wide accountability.
- Analyze how Microsoft redesigned sales, finance, HR, and marketing processes so employees could use data to act faster, collaborate across functions, and focus more directly on customers.
- Assess how self-service business intelligence, supported by shared data, data science, change management, and BI enablement teams, helped spread data-driven decision making across the company.
- Identify organizational designs that establish data-domain connections and assess the impact they have on the innovation and diffusion of new and shared behaviors and mindset.
Abstract
Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, in 2017 Microsoft was an $85 billion technology company that employed 114,000 people and operated around the globe. In 2014, Satya Nadella became CEO and accelerated the company’s transformation to a cloud services business model. The transformation inspired new attention to and capabilities around data, particularly in the areas of metrics and dashboards, analytics-powered work processes, and data science services. By 2017, 61 percent of Microsoft’s workforce was using business intelligence monthly. This working paper describes Microsoft’s journey to becoming a data-driven organization and the key activities that facilitated the company’s progress.
Appropriate for the Following Course(s)
digital transformation, data management and analytics, business intelligence, organizational culture, and business process reengineering
THERE IS NO TEACHING NOTE FOR THIS CASE STUDY.