Transforming our digital workplace with Office 365 Enterprise E5

Microsoft IT Showcase

Page 18|Transforming our digital workplace with Office 365 Enterprise E5

Transforming our digital workplace with Office365EnterpriseE5

Every business needs to digitally transformthe constantly shifting computing landscape demands it. At Microsoft, weve embraced this challenge and were well our way toward accomplishing our goal of being digital by default. Whether its managing and protecting rapidly-increasing amounts of corporate data and intellectual property, or helping our highly mobile workforce work quickly and safely from anywhere in the world, were using vital Office365EnterpriseE5 technologies that are robust enough to handle the magnitude of our need. Equally important, E5 technologies are helping us set a new pace. Theyre helping us reduce lengthy processes and boost productivity.

E5 delivers insights, collaboration, and security

Microsoft organizations everywhere are using new and powerful analytics, voice, and security solutions in E5. Its the most complete and secure productivity and communication platform for our digital workplace. And its a driving force toward our move to make powerful self-service business and personal analytics a foundation of our culture.

By using E5, our employees and business partners get business data analytics with Power BI, personal data analytics with Microsoft MyAnalytics, and seamless conferencing and calling options with Skype for Business. Microsoft IT gets protection from advanced threats, effective new ways to manage data for discovery and compliance purposes, unified management, and robust data access controls. And Microsoft overall benefits from tremendous cost savings, more agile teams, and thorough visibility and insights into data and organizations.

Finance evolution and E5

Our own Finance organization is a prime example of how were using E5 analytics, communications, and security features to help us achieve our digital transformation. With access to and responsibility for vast amounts of business data, our ongoing digital transformation has given Finance a new focusto explore new opportunities for growth by understanding the data they manage.

Finance simplifies

Finance has always had aggressive objectives for revenue, partners, employees, and market capitalization. About 15years ago, the business realized that operational inefficiencies and disparate sources of business data were formidable roadblocks to its goals.

Since then, the organization has undergone multiple significant initiatives that simplified and improved processes and operational efficiencies. Hundreds of data sources and unmonitored Shadow IT apps were whittled down to only 50 data sources. And recently, Finance consolidated those 50 data sources into a single source of truth contained in a Microsoft Azure Data Lake, secured with role-based Azure Active Directory access. The Data Lake provides all of our analysts around the world instantaneous access to almost 2 billion key performance indicators.

New opportunities and IT partnership

The priorities and roles of todays finance executivesat Microsoft and everywhere elseare fundamentally changing. Although the traditional goals of finding new sources of revenue and reducing costs remain constant, a fresh focus on exploring new opportunities for growth has been added. Finance teams now serve as business analysts who power the insights that an entire organization depends on to grow and innovate.

This new focus requires substantial agility to balance many competing priorities, including:

Strategically harnessing the power of data analysis.

Reducing lengthy processes and working faster.

Facilitating collaboration among employees and business partners who work from anywhere and from any device.

Championing the rapidly changing, mobile-first world to accelerate business value and decrease costs.

Enhancing our ability to be nimble, compliant, and secure, while embracing cloud computing at the same time.

Innovate and protect

At the same time that Finance is challenged with pushing for business innovation, data security concerns continue to mount. Attacks grow in sophistication and in their potential to disrupt. In short, were in very turbulent times when protecting corporate assets. Managing and protecting data is a top priority.

This is why strong partnerships between Finance, IT, and Information Security are so critical. Finance, IT, and Information Security experts must work together to drive technology innovations, while managing risk at the same time. The challenge is to keep people safe while also empowering businesses to take risks and grasp new opportunities. A reflection of this key partnership is that across industries, 39 percent of IT departments now report up through their Finance organizations.

Finance and analytics

The new analytics components in E5 inform our Finance organizations business and personal productivity decisions with data-driven insights. Power BI offers an intuitive experience for interacting with business data and provides a rich consolidated view of key information, no matter where the underlying data is stored. MyAnalytics (formerly called Delve Analytics)a brand new category of insightshelps our employees and teams gain insights about personal and group productivity, and helps them to make informed decisions about their time and collaboration investments.

Power BI delivers business insights

Because data and insights are generated in real time, every layer of an organization can seek out trends and become transformational change agents. Power BI puts the power of data insights into the hands of employees, and takes IT out of the business of building dashboards, which is resource-intensive and time consuming.

Power BI is provisioned across Microsoft and there is an active and enthusiastic base of people who use it, including practically all of our knowledge workers. It delivers cloud-based analytics and a rich data visualization service that inform our business decisions.

Integrated with Excel, our employees create their own interactive Power BI dashboards and reports to generate the insights they need to drive their business groups forward at the pace required. Power BI also provides new ways to interact with datausing Cortana and natural language queries.

Our Finance organization has used infrastructure changes and Power BI to evolve to a powerful, self-service analytics capability.

Dynamic dashboards drive strategic insights, deliver meeting productivity

Across Microsoft, our Finance organization had to wrestle with multiple data sources that made business reviews time consuming and cumbersome. Stumbling blocks included:

Subsidiariesnearly 200built out their own static decks.

Business review decks could range from two, to two hundred pages.

Analysts had to iterate back and forth to get answers to questions.

Time-intensive queries produced cumbersome, multi-page reports with literally thousands of data points.

By adopting Power BI, Finance immediately gained speed and agility. For example, using Power BI dashboards at business review meetings eliminated the old processand let the organization bridge the gap from data to insights.

In the past, getting the data and creating the visualssuch as manually creating waterfall chartstook so much time that it left very little time for deeper analysis or insights. However, now Power BI lets us shortcut and automate the labor-intensive creation of the visuals and reports, so that our analysts can focus on activities to gain deeper insights, like drilling down through the data, speaking with account teams, and so on.

Dynamic dashboards revealed insights that let attendees dive in deeperwithout paperin key business review meetings. Because the effects of changed data points could be discussed immediately, it uncovered different discussion drivers, and led to more robust conversations.

Figure 1. Dynamic visualizations

The organization accrued many benefits from Power BI, including:

Dashboards saved time. Dashboards dramatically reduced the time required to run reports.

Dashboards changed meeting dynamics. Data sources were combined into a single real-time dashboard that could be manipulated during a meeting.

The Finance organization evolved strategically. They evolved to focus on discovering strategic insights, rather than running reports.

Power BI fostered a what-if mindset. With Power BI dashboards, data could be changed immediately, which encouraged forward-thinking questions.

Natural language leveled the playing field. Data can now be questioned with natural language queries. This removed the barriers of time and expertise associated with writing complex queries.

Power BI provided do-it-yourself data modeling for all levels. It empowered everyone to create dashboards for themselves in minutes, instead of asking IT to do it.

Power BI helped run the business with a consolidated view. Dashboards increased productivity and the ability to spot trends as they happen.

Finance professionals shared dashboards securely. They can also view the dashboards from any device, including mobile devices.

Power BI is as straightforward as Excel. Power BI has a small learning curve.

Power BI gave us the information we needed when Britain voted to exit from the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum (commonly known as Brexit).

Power BI provided timely currency data

In June 2016 when the Brexit vote occurred, financial markets were immediately affected. Our T