MICROSOFT TURNS TO DATA
TO DRIVE BUSINESS SUCCESS
Ida A. Someh and Barbara H. Wixom
JULY 2017 | CISR WP NO. 419 | 14 PAGES
CASE STUDY
an in-depth description of a firm’s approach to an IT management issue
(intended for MBA and executive education)
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
BIG DATA
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
MACHINE LEARNING
DATA SCIENCE
ANALYTICS
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
DATA-DRIVEN ORGANIZATION
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.
CLOUD
ENTERPRISE SERVICES
© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.
Someh and Wixom | CISR Working Paper No. 419 | 2
CONTENTS
Enriching Performance Management with New Metrics...................... 4
Consolidating and Reengineering Business Processes.............................. 5
Adjusting the Sales Process................................................................................................... 5
Working in New Ways Across Microsoft................................................................... 7
Finance............................................................................................................................................................ 7
Human Resources.............................................................................................................................. 7
Marketing..................................................................................................................................................... 7
Promoting Self-Service Business Intelligence..................................................... 7
Becoming a Data-Driven Organization........................................................................ 9
Someh and Wixom | CISR Working Paper No. 419 | 3
MICROSOFT TURNS TO DATA TO DRIVE
BUSINESS SUCCESS
Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, in 2017 Microsoft
was an $85 billion technology company that employed
114,000 people and operated around the globe.1 In 2014,
Satya Nadella accepted the role of chief executive officer at
Microsoft Corporation and began to accelerate Microsoft’s
transformation into a cloud services company. Nadella had
led the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Group from 2011
to 2014, during which time he learned firsthand what a
cloud-based business model at the company required: The
cloud entailed delivering pre-existing software services in
new ways with different pricing structures (such as Office
365,2 delivered on-demand and priced by usage). The cloud
called for generating entirely new revenue streams (such as
cybersecurity monitoring) to meet emergent customer needs.
However, business model transformation would not be easy or comfortable for many Microsoft employees. The company had spent much of its
history as a leading product-centric company that sold boxed software.
This had produced exceptionally well-run siloed businesses such as Xbox
and Windows that had little incentive to change.
Satya had a very hard problem to solve. He had a 90,000-person
organization that was based on the concept of independent business units. He had numerous product lines, each being managed as
if it had an independent P&L, each with its own engineering team.
MICHAEL ALCOCK, DIRECTOR, CIO EXECUTIVE PROGRAMS, CIO CONTENT
1 Microsoft Corporation – company summary report. (2017). OneSource. OneSource Information Service, Inc. Retrieved from OneSource Global Business Browser, July 28, 2017.
2 “Office 365” refers to subscription plans that include access to Office applications plus other
productivity services that are enabled over the Internet (cloud services). Office 365 includes
plans for use at home and for business. See “Office 365 for business FAQ,” Microsoft Office,
https://products.office.com/en-us/business/microsoft-office-365-frequently-asked-questions.
This case study was prepared by Ida A. Someh of The University of Melbourne and Barbara H.
Wixom of the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (CISR). The case was written for the purposes of class discussion, rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective
handling of a managerial situation. The authors would like to acknowledge and thank the
executives at Microsoft Corporation for their participation in the case study.
© 2017 MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research. All rights reserved to the authors.
Someh and Wixom | CISR Working Paper No. 419 | 4
Microsoft’s successful transformation into a cloud services company would hinge on its making business processes, company culture, and employee mindset more data driven. More data and better use of it would improve
Microsoft’s understanding of and responsiveness to customer needs—both critical requirements for effective
cloud services delivery. Nadella spoke widely and often, to both internal and external stakeholders, about the
company’s growing reliance on data.
The move to the cloud is transformative. The fact that you have the application endpoints now in every
device, the usage there is growing every day. But perhaps the most salient point of this cloud transformation is the transformation around data. In other words, it’s not just a new way of delivering the
software as a service, but it’s fundamentally changing the value we deliver.3
SATYA NADELLA, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
Starting in 2014, Microsoft engaged in three data-oriented efforts to facilitate the transformation of its business
model and its organizational culture. First, top management enriched performance management processes with
new metrics to better monitor cloud services and identify market needs. Second, business leaders consolidated
and reengineered business processes so that employees could work in more efficient, evidence-based ways.
Third, the IT department introduced into Microsoft the company’s own suite of self-service business analytics
tools, Microsoft Power BI, which promoted data and analytics best practices and inspired evidence-based decision making across the organization.
By 2017, the positive impacts from Microsoft’s transformational efforts were clear. 61 percent of Microsoft’s
workforce was using Power BI monthly. Product revenues from Microsoft Azure, the company’s public cloud
computing platform, had grown by 93 percent. And the company’s stock price had nearly doubled (see exhibit 1).
ENRICHING PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WITH NEW METRICS
Microsoft’s movement to cloud services required new strategies for monitoring and evaluating business performance. Nadella and his team could no longer rely solely on unit sales figures; they needed a solid understanding
of customer engagement and actual product usage to gauge performance and forecast growth.
If you don’t understand how your products or services are being used, then how do you better define
your product or service strategy?
JACKY WRIGHT, CORPORATE VICE PRESIDENT, CORE SERVICES ENGINEERING4
Nadella wanted to regularly monitor a dozen metrics that served as leading indicators for key pillars of the
Microsoft business. For example, Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood had defined and institutionalized a handful of
metrics that reflected market power (e.g., the number of active devices using Windows 10, market share measures). But identifying—and then finding—data to support company-wide metrics was challenging.
Getting data was hard because [it] was buried in source systems or Excel spreadsheets. At times, people don’t want to share data between organizations.
PATRICK BAUMGARTNER, PRINCIPAL PROGRAM MANAGER, POWER BI
Some of these new engagement metrics required data drawn from new or previously untapped sources. For
example, metrics regarding customers’ attitudes about Microsoft services (such as how customers feel about the
quality of their Skype calls) were informed by textual data from customer surveys and polls, social media data,
3 Satya Nadella (keynote address, Worldwide Partner Conference 2016, Toronto, Canada, July 11, 2016), https://news.microsoft.com/
speeches/satya-nadella-worldwide-partner-conference-2016/#3xsJ7DkiYFHuVSLd.99.
4 In July 2017, Microsoft IT was renamed internally as Core Services Engineering.
Someh and Wixom | CISR Working Paper No. 419 | 5
and sentiment analyses. Metrics related to product usage (such as whether a customer used a product, for how
long, and in what way) originated from telemetry data extracted from the cloud platform.
To help identify data-rich systems and encourage data sharing between businesses, Nadella hosted an internal
dashboard-building hackathon. Business units across Microsoft collaborated on building a senior management
dashboard; the effort identified both the systems that held critical data and the business owners accountable for
results. It also led to the shrinkage of organizational data silos and diminished cross-division resistance to sharing.
We produced the dashboard as quickly as we could, and then we put columns for every division’s data
on the scorecard—inserting a N/A or TBD for the groups that didn’t contribute data. It didn't take very
long before we were getting contacted by the teams with missing data. They wanted to have their data
represented on Satya’s wall.
PATRICK BAUMGARTNER, PRINCIPAL PRODUCT MANAGER, POWER BI
While Nadella expected the dashboard to evolve over time, to encourage adoption he began using it immediately and regularly. Emulating Nadella’s example, leaders across the company created dashboards for their own
organizational units.
Certain metrics—particularly ones that reflected customer engagement—resonated and were shared across the
company. Business units leveraged these shared metrics in unique ways. Marketing achieved broader and deeper
customer engagement by using the metrics to learn how to interact more effectively with customers, such as by
messaging customers through products. Product Engineering increased adoption and consumption of services,
learning how to improve service quality via the metrics.
Within IT, Chief Information Officer Jim DuBois5 established a three-person team to develop IT-specific metrics
and dashboards. The team excelled at creating leading-edge dashboard content, technology, and processes in
short periods of time. Dubois recognized that his executive peers could also benefit from the team’s expertise, so
he made the dashboard team available free of charge. As a result, Dubois’s popular three-person team catalyzed
widespread use of dashboards at the senior management level.
CONSOLIDATING AND REENGINEERING BUSINESS PROCESSES
Nadella appreciated that Microsoft’s product-based organizational structure would hamper the company’s
pursuit of service-related business strategies. Thus, in 2015, he consolidated core business functions (e.g., Sales,
Marketing) to encourage open rather than siloed product-oriented perspectives. This structure, Nadella believed,
positioned Microsoft to show “one face to the customer.”
For IT, this meant that a shared IT services team would continue to provide core enterprise services, while other
parts of IT partnered with their respective business functions. Sales, for example, could both leverage shared enterprise capabilities and benefit from a dedicated IT team focused on the sales processes. To encourage cross-functional collaboration, company management adjusted employee incentives so that one of the three core pillars of
assessing an employee’s performance was based on how well he or she collaborated across the organization.
Adjusting the Sales Process
Newly consolidated business units across Microsoft began to critically reexamine work practices. Within the sales
unit, leaders determined that cloud-based services mandated a completely new, service-oriented sales approach.
In the old days, I sold you a three-year license. Then a year before that was up, I’d be back on your
doorstep saying, “Hey, it’s time to renew next year. Let’s start talking about how we need to think
about that.” Now, after I’ve sold something to a customer, I have to make sure they deploy it and use
5 Jim DuBois retired as Chief Information Officer of Microsoft in July 2017.
Someh and Wixom | CISR Working Paper No. 419 | 6
it on a regular basis. I need to track consumption of cloud-based products. Otherwise, the customer is
not going to renew, and Microsoft will lose that revenue stream.
CHARLES LASCO, PRINCIPAL PROGRAM MANAGER, CORE SERVICES ENGINEERING
A service-oriented approach required a comprehensive view—across all products—of customer purchases,
support requests, marketing exposure, and miscellaneous other communications with Microsoft. Yet to amass
this enterprise view, a sales executive was forced to scan, manually select, and extract data from up to eighty
different systems.
To resolve this inefficiency, sales leaders opted to reengineer core sales processes, including pipeline management, opportunity management, and forecasting. Leaders wanted Microsoft’s salespeople to spend their time
interacting with customers rather than gathering data. Their goal was to increase a salesperson’s “effective” time
(the time they spent communicating with customers) by 30 percent to 1.5 days per week. The goal was achievable, they believed, if computed insights from the enterprise system replaced inefficient data gathering.
As a first step toward the service-oriented enterprise-wide view, sales leaders attempted to define shared sales
concepts—such as what is meant by “pipeline” or “lead”—and build consensus of the agreed-upon definitions
among salespeople, sales managers, and IT.
The definition of what a lead is was a monthlong debate. Eventually we all coalesced around the fact
that a lead is a contactable customer. It is a person. A lead is not an idea. That then drove a lot of different decision making in how we think about our platform and … our data model.
JAMES DE REUCK, DIRECTOR, SALES PROCESS AND PLATFORMS
Next, sales leaders looked for data sources that could feed relevant sales-specific metrics into the enterprise
platform. The leaders quickly learned, however, that data was scattered across too many discrete sources for its
existing platform to provision effectively.
Within a year, the sales and shared services IT teams and their business partners had created an entirely new
sales platform called Microsoft Sales Experience (MSX), which culled and consolidated sales data to produce
360-degree views of Microsoft’s relationships with corporate customers. For each customer, this new system
outlined purchases, detailed issues and complaints, and archived communications.
Salespeople really need two things. They need fresh data to have conversations with their managers
and to have a realistic view of how they are doing against budget commitments or quotas, and they
also need help trying to figure out what the next step is or how realistic their forecast is.
CHARLES LASCO, PRINCIPAL PROGRAM MANAGER, CORE SERVICES ENGINEERING
The new system benefited sales managers, executives, and support staff; each of these stakeholders, however,
used the system differently. A sales manager, for example, would monitor his or her regional sales pipeline; a
sales executive, on the other hand, would view in-depth reports and metrics for his or her individual sales portfolio. To improve the speed and accuracy of sales processes, sales leaders appointed a team to design multiple user
interfaces—each customized to a unique sales persona—and to incorporate analytics into the system.
Forecasts are very poor when they are human based. People are either sandbagging, or they’re overly
optimistic about the likelihood of closure, and you see $900 million slip from one quarter to the next.
When we start applying mathematical models, we can [realistically predict] the likelihood of closure.
CHARLES LASCO
Over time, Microsoft salespeople learned to leverage the new sales system to forecast more accurately.
Someh and Wixom | CISR Working Paper No. 419 | 7
WORKING IN NEW WAYS ACROSS MICROSOFT
As sales leaders moved ahead with their business process efforts, other consolidated business units across Microsoft were making similarly dramatic changes to address their own unique needs and pain points.
Finance
In Finance, leaders targeted improving the effectiveness of financial analysts by reducing the cycle time for moving from financial analysis to field action. Finance leaders believed that they could achieve this by enabling easier
data manipulation and analysis and better storytelling skills.
Leaders used a suite of flexible, comprehensive analytical tools to help analysts easily access data and reconfigure their analyses so that they could answer questions on the fly during business reviews. The intention
was that analysts should spend more time communicating results to partners—and presenting actionable
insights—than producing analyses. To hone communication skills and presentation techniques, leaders established a storytelling training program for analysts with webinars, live demonstrations, videos, and in-person
sessions. Within 15 months, these efforts helped financial analysts reduce data gathering time by 30 percent
and increased partner communication.
Human Resources
Human Resources leaders focused on developing the HR team’s analytics abilities. HR IT created easy-to-use
dashboards using Power BI with help from the shared services IT team. HR managers learned data-driven-decision making skills from HR analysts with whom they were paired by HR leaders.
To educate HR employees on how to use the dashboards and access their benefits, IT created short videos, FAQs,
online classes, and instructional manuals. IT used the training data and employee sentiment data from annual
employee surveys to measure the success of and satisfaction regarding the training activities.
Via the dashboards, all HR employees could quickly access and track metrics, including employee churn rates
and top sources for new hires. Not only did the HR dashboards promote deeper insight into job candidates and
employee performance, they also prompted employees to consider how HR activities could be more effective.
Marketing
Marketing leaders focused less on improving employee skills and more on integrating data with marketing
responsibilities. As one Marketing manager explained, the chief marketing officer wanted to “push data as air to
marketing teams” to enable real-time customer communications experiments. Marketing’s goal was to use data
first to reveal a consumer’s wants and needs, and then to create a targeted strategy to increase that customer’s
adoption and consumption of Microsoft’s services.
Marketers leveraged Azure Cosmos DB, Microsoft’s internal big data solution that sourced data from instrumentalized services, social media interactions, and third-party data sources. They used Cosmos to create demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal profiles of users, and experimented with personalized offers, messages, and
services. The results of these experiments were shared across the company via Yammer—Microsoft’s own enterprise social networking product—and also in the Microsoft Journal of Applied Research, the company’s internal
journal publication.
PROMOTING SELF-SERVICE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
As Microsoft leaders and employees increasingly relied upon data to make decisions, Jim DuBois invested in and
built up four enterprise shared services groups—Data, Data Science, Change Management, and Business Intelligence—to deliver on these needs (see the Microsoft IT Services Offerings organization chart in exhibit 2 for the
placement of the enterprise shared services groups). Business Intelligence (BI)—branded BI@Microsoft—was the
data service most visible to end users and often employed as a “hook” to promote further data use (see exhibit 3).
Someh and Wixom | CISR Working Paper No. 419 | 8
As we’re shifting to being a data-driven company, we want to enable everybody to use BI on a
self-service basis.
KIRKLAND BARRETT, DIRECTOR OF BI@MICROSOFT PROGRAM, CORE SERVICES ENGINEERING
Jacky Wright, Corporate Vice President, Core Services Engineering, led the four data-oriented groups and encouraged her employees to support and promote self-service business intelligence across Microsoft. Wright and her
directors considered the Data, Data Science, and Change Management groups “high-value plumbing” for BI.
The Data group established a “single source of truth” for all data shared across Microsoft (e.g., financial metrics provided to Wall Street, a common list of countries). The group ensured that core6 data (see exhibit 4) met
expected quality standards, and worked to remediate data quality problems. Additionally, the group sponsored
and/or worked with data governance committees to resolve issues among business stakeholders, control data
access, and identify shared data that should be managed centrally.
Data Science was responsible for “democratizing” analytics and machine learning across Microsoft. The group
partnered with both IT and non-IT colleagues to identify unmet needs and created enterprise data services in
response. For example, the Data Science group along with security experts within IT developed analytics to
improve security and risk management practices. Outside of IT, this group and Facilities colleagues leveraged
analytics to create “smart” building heating and cooling solutions.
The Change Management group focused on designing and delivering services to improve the adoption of analytics tools across the organization. For example, the group worked with business process owners to prepare
meaningful training materials, and with business units to monitor adoption rates.
BI@Microsoft was focused on supporting the spread of self-service business intelligence to Microsoft’s employees and vendors.
We actually don’t build any BI. We are all about helping others go further and faster. We have a preferred supplier network. So if you came to me needing help doing BI, I would share a list of ten suppliers that you can go work with.
KIRKLAND BARRETT
The BI@Microsoft program relied heavily on frequent and scalable communication strategies to promote BI
self-service. The program sponsored a website with manuals, videos, and quick-start guides that answered,
“What is data, and how can I use data in my world?” The program published monthly newsletters (see exhibit 5),
offered online classes, and held virtual office hours. The BI@Microsoft team used Yammer to foster interactive
communities. Yammer community members corresponded, answered each other’s questions, shared ideas, and
inspired innovation.
BI@Microsoft leaders drove Power BI adoption by hiring marketers and training existing IT Services Offerings
team members in marketing skills. The use of marketing techniques—including market segmentation, campaign
planning, and collecting user surveys—to influence user attitudes and behaviors entailed a skill shift for the IT
Services Offerings group.
By incorporating sales and marketing skills into our process, we have a customer-centric marketing
view into how we approach the use of our tools.
JACKY WRIGHT, CORPORATE VICE PRESIDENT, CORE SERVICES ENGINEERING
6 Microsoft categorized data as being either solid core, semi-solid, or fluid. Solid core data was foundational master data managed centrally
by IT and shared across the enterprise. Semi-solid data was business process data managed by local business process IT groups. Fluid data
represented new types of social, competitive, and market data that were used for experiments and for innovation efforts.
Someh and Wixom | CISR Working Paper No. 419 | 9
Wright relied heavily on Power BI’s engagement metrics to evaluate the success of her directors’ activities. Data
from many sources was fed into Power BI dashboards.
We’ve got [BI] usage data. We’ve got website traffic data. We’ve got when we send out emails, what’s
getting the click-through, and what people are clicking on. We try to correlate that to “Hey, are we
seeing uptakes in different groups?” We've got dashboards on pretty much everything we do.
KIRKLAND BARRETT, DIRECTOR OF BI@MICROSOFT PROGRAM, CORE SERVICES ENGINEERING
Wright reviewed engagement metrics with her directors monthly. Each director was expected to identify “usage
blockers,” a term to describe barriers to adoption, and to create strategies for removing those barriers. This
structured approach helped directors prioritize their efforts, measure progress, and nurture wider and deeper
Power BI use across the company.
It’s getting up to about 33% of the company doing something in Power BI each month. We are trying to
drive weekly active usage up as well. [A leading research analyst firm published] numbers to say 25%
is good, 50% is possible. That’s what we are trying to hit—getting the monthly active usage up to that
50% level.
KIRKLAND BARRETT
Wright’s leadership team relied on business and IT leadership across Microsoft to encourage Power BI use at the
local level. Embedded IT groups (e.g., sales IT, finance IT) were critical partners in driving company-wide adoption of data services.
If we can activate these different business process unit IT groups, then they affect thousands of users.
We’re constantly looking for amplification points to be able to bubble up the most important things but
then also drive out wider usage.
KIRKLAND BARRETT
BECOMING A DATA-DRIVEN ORGANIZATION
By 2017, employees across Microsoft were incorporating data into their work (see exhibit 6). The changes were
striking when compared with earlier Microsoft practices.
You can’t make [a data culture] happen in a few months. It’s starting to happen here now after two
years. We are starting to see that change happening. It’s not about hitting a home run. Every day, you
have to get that base hit to affect the larger culture. Then all of a sudden, there is a point at which you
realize that everybody is using Power BI.
KIRKLAND BARRETT
Barrett reflected on new habits and behaviors that were the direct result of this new data-centric culture:
You have the CVP of Manufacturing Management. He comes in and talks about how data is the new
currency. That’s a win right there. He talks about how he now has real-time dashboards that he brings
up on his phone. He cancels meetings because he can [make decisions using] his phone.
KIRKLAND BARRETT
Someh and Wixom | CISR Working Paper No. 419 | 10
Employee impact on data product development and design was an unintended benefit of Microsoft’s growing BI
and data culture. Employees’ needs and suggestions were collected by both direct and indirect mechanisms. Via
crowdsourcing tool UserVoice,7 employees suggested product improvements and voted on the priority of new
features. The BI@Microsoft group monitored Yammer forums for product requirements by analyzing the social
streams and identifying common product conversation topics. The shared IT services team disseminated relevant
employee feedback to product groups so that it could inform product management, design, and innovation
across Microsoft applications.
It’s not just a matter of rolling out something, it’s helping the product groups envision where they need
to go. So we created very deep partnerships with the product groups. My team meets with them on a
daily basis. We meet with their leadership, and we have huge influence on them.
KIRKLAND BARRETT, DIRECTOR OF BI@MICROSOFT PROGRAM, CORE SERVICES ENGINEERING
A second unintended benefit of Microsoft’s growing data culture was linked to the number of internal data
services that were eventually productized and sold. The shared IT services team required collaboration from
Microsoft Product and Consulting Services on these efforts.
As we [developed internal cybersecurity models by applying machine learning techniques], our data
science team partnered with the Security and Risk team and the Product team to create cybersecurity
solutions for Microsoft's customers. This has created a repeatable, scalable solution [that] is now being
offered to our customers by Microsoft Consulting Services and Field Sales people.
SARMILA BASU, DIRECTOR OF DATA SCIENCE, CORE SERVICES ENGINEERING
Many services, such as the Data Science group’s cybersecurity solutions, were productized for Microsoft customers only after rounds of internal use case experimentation and validation. New performance metrics (e.g.,
revenues generated from productized solutions) were established for groups that offered external services.
Microsoft’s success in expanding its cloud platform and services was evident. Use of Microsoft Azure more than
doubled during the last quarter of 2016, making it the second most popular cloud platform (after Amazon Web
Services, Inc.8) and giving Microsoft control of a significant portion of the cloud market. At the 2016 Microsoft
Annual Shareholders Meeting, Nadella reported:
Microsoft Cloud is winning significant customer support. Our commercial cloud annualized revenue run
rate exceeds $13 billion, and we remain on track to achieve our goal of $20 billion in fiscal ‘18. Azure
revenue has grown triple digits over the last seven consecutive quarters in constant currency. And
more than 60 percent of the Fortune 500 now have at least three of our cloud offerings.
SATYA NADELLA, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
Nadella emphasized that business success and culture change go hand-in-hand.
…It’s so important for us to have a sense of purpose and identity and mission, and a culture that allows
you to constantly renew yourself, because technologies will come and go. But to me, that sense of identity—about us being able to really contribute to empowering both people and organizations to achieve
more—that’s at the core.
SATYA NADELLA
7 UserVoice, a San Francisco based Software as a Service (SaaS) company, develops product feedback management software; https://www.
uservoice.com.
8 “Microsoft Shows Strong Growth in Cloud as Azure Usage Doubles,” Steve Rosenbush, The Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2017, https://
blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/01/27/the-morning-download-microsoft-shows-strong-growth-in-cloud-as-azure-usage-doubles/.
Someh and Wixom | CISR Working Paper No. 419 | 11
Exhibit 1: Microsoft’s Stock Performance from 2014 to 2017
Source: “Head in the cloud: What Satya Nadella did at Microsoft,” The Economist, March 16, 2017, http://www.economist.com/news/business/21718916-worlds-biggest-software-firm-has-transformed-its-culture-better-getting-cloud.
Someh and Wixom | CISR Working Paper No. 419 | 12
Exhibit 2: Microsoft IT Services Offerings, June 2017
Note: In July 2017, Microsoft IT was renamed internally as Core Services Engineering.
Source: Microsoft.
Someh and Wixom | CISR Working Paper No. 419 | 13
Exhibit 3: BI@Microsoft Program
Source: Microsoft.
Exhibit 4: Three Categories of Data at Microsoft
Source: Microsoft.
Someh and Wixom | CISR Working Paper No. 419 | 14
Exhibit 5: BI@Microsoft Newsletter
Source: Microsoft.
Exhibit 6: Power BI use within Microsoft
Source: Microsoft.
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Barbara H. Wixom, Stephanie L. Woerner
Information as of July 2017
Founded in 1974 and grounded in the MIT tradition of rigorous field-based research, MIT CISR helps executives meet
the challenge of leading dynamic, global, and information-intensive organizations. We provide the CIO and other
digital leaders with insights on topics such as business complexity, data monetization, and the digital workplace.
Through research, teaching, and events, the center stimulates interaction among scholars, students, and practitioners.
More than ninety firms sponsor our work and participate in our consortium.