Culture, the cloud, and security: learning from Microsoft’s digital transformation

How do you get the most out of digitally transforming your company?

If you are an IT leader or an IT practitioner, you know that this is not an easy task.

You have to deal with complex and evolving needs for both your employees and your company.

We think we can help you with this by sharing how our approach to our own digital transformation here at Microsoft has evolved over time.

In this episode of our Inside Track Spotlight interview series, our Senior Business Program Manager Gabe Storment speaks with colleagues Ed Novak and Lisa Miniken on work our larger Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE) organization is doing to transform our employee experience here at Microsoft.

There are three areas where we—Microsoft’s IT organization—are rethinking the experience our employees have at work: Culture, the cloud, and security.

Sometimes transforming your enterprise is about giving employees just the right access, and sometimes it’s about not showing them information they don’t need to see. Novak, a regional experience lead in MDEE, tied it together with an example from his first week at Microsoft.

“I plugged in my laptop to the wall, and I had access to everything at the company,” Novak says. “I was trying to clean up my workspace, and I ended up deleting all these source files. I had no idea, but I had access to data that I didn’t need to have.”

This unnecessary access is illustrative of how far we’ve come.

“Now we’re leveraging this identity in the device health to give you access to only the things that are relevant for your job,” Novak says.

To learn more, watch our video where we explore our transformation from a traditional IT organization to the modern digital organization today. Get tips for building partnerships across business units, understand the Shadow IT landscape at Microsoft, and learn about what surprises our customers when they meet with us.

One example that intrigues a lot of people we speak to is that there isn’t just one IT organization at Microsoft anymore. “We currently have our IT functions distributed across several organizations at Microsoft, and that’s something that is really unusual,” says Miniken, a senior business program manager with MDEE.

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