When businesses plunged into a dizzying era of change in 2020 , chief digital officers led their organizations—almost overnight—into a new world of virtual meetings, classes, showrooms, doctor’s appointments, and events. Now they’re pivoting again as businesses embrace hybrid work, an accelerating trend that already encompasses 38 percent of the global workforce. In such fast-moving times, chief digital officers, or CDOs, have to guide their organizations calmly through the present—while simultaneously planning for more twists and turns still ahead.
Through it all, the CDO works closely with human resources leaders—because now more than ever, the chief people officer (or human resources officer) is at the nexus of culture and technology. Both roles use their own perspectives and knowledge to tackle the question, How can technology help humans work better? At Microsoft, the chief digital officer is tasked with designing the technology roadmap to enable employee experience for the company’s 190,000-person global workforce, and using everything being learned inside the company to help customers.
Here, Microsoft CDO Andrew Wilson—who joined the company just weeks before the pandemic upended the ways organizations run—discusses the new realities of digital transformation in hybrid work, the challenges of the Great Reshuffle , and how to share Microsoft’s culture with tens of thousands of new employees who haven’t ever set foot in the office. Since the role of CDO is a relatively new addition to the C-suite, let’s start with a definition of terms.
Microsoft Chief Digital Officer Andrew Wilson
On how to decode the “alphabet soup” of acronyms—CIO, CISO, CTO, CDO—used for technology leaders…
There’s overlap, and they’re not the same from one company to the next. But traditionally, CIOs focused on infrastructure; that comes from a time when organizations owned a lot of what they operated on—on-premise data centers, networks, etc. At Microsoft, though, we don't have a CIO. Here, our CTO, or chief technology officer, role is focused on market-facing capabilities. Then you have the CISO, the chief information security officer, because you can't build anything new without designing security at the core.
Typically, the CDO is the person in charge of digital transformation —business innovation fueled by progress in the cloud, AI, and other technologies. At Microsoft, our employees are ‘customer zero’—the first to experiment with our new features and products. And so another core part of my job is to make that experimentation and everything we’re learning more transparent and publicly available.
Let’s not forget another acronym: CHRO, chief human resources officer, also known as the chief people officer. Digital leaders need to work with HR on talent and the talent architecture, and the culture of the way work is done in the organization. Technology is a major part of business transformation, but not the only part.
On why we still need more “digital transformation” after such an intense period of change…
I don’t think there is a finish line to transformation. We’ve typecast digital transformation to be the thing that delivers the change objective of the particular era, like getting to the cloud. But being 100 percent in the cloud doesn’t mean you’re finished. The cloud is an ever-evolving set of capabilities that an organization constantly needs to update, learn, understand, grow, and benefit from.
“Digital leaders need to work with HR on talent and the culture of the way work is done in the organization. Technology is a major part of business transformation, but not the only part.”
You have to be quick and flexible in evaluating technology capabilities, not just to keep up but to actually determine what’s ready for prime time, how it can be deployed in your business, and how you measure its return on investment. There will always be another chapter of business evolution that will require transformational digital technologies. Sometimes transformation is seen to be cleaning up the past, modernizing, and translating. Over time, there will be less of that. And there will be more creation of new capabilities that power business, experiences, and new opportunities with customers.
On the challenges of having a customer base that ranges from Xbox gamers to Fortune 500 companies…
Today we have literally millions of customers, ranging from the individual on a gaming system to the largest organizations on the planet. How can customers consume Microsoft products more easily, more fluidly, and more elegantly? Even if that customer has had big, complex contracts with Microsoft for years? Microsoft must modernize all of that—and maintain the history and rich heritage it has with every individual customer. That’s a challenge. For a business, growth is great, but you can’t forget to provide an excellent experience for your customers.
On why your company needs to provide an excellent experience for employees, too...
People who want to work at Microsoft tend to have things like Microsoft 365, Teams, Azure, and Xbox on their minds. What I’m doing is technology-enabling the enterprise, but it just happens to be in a company that is famous for its engineering divisions. So I’ve got to compete in the overall talent market when it comes to hiring and retention, but I also have to compete with Microsoft because of our strong engineering culture.
A broader question is, Post-pandemic, what is the value proposition of working for Microsoft? I think any organization that isn’t very focused on that question at the moment is definitely missing the point.
On the high stakes of building an organizational culture post-pandemic…
When I started at Microsoft, I expected to go and understand the culture of work in a campus-based organization. And of course, that didn’t happen. And I don’t think it ever will. We have had tens of thousands of new employees join Microsoft in the last two years who’ve never even been on a campus. They’ve joined a completely different culture. Is it the same culture? The cultural question is one of our biggest challenges; that’s one reason we created Viva , our employee experience platform.
“The challenges of having a level playing field in meetings where some of the participants are in a room, some are in a different room, and some are remote are going to be far-reaching and not solved overnight.”
How are employees adapting in a hybrid model, which has a combination of on-campus and virtual working? We read a lot, don’t we, about ‘do people want to go back?’ Our own research has shown that there’s a contradiction here. People want the flexibility of virtual, but they miss the connectivity and presence of being in a community. So how can we deliver both, both technologically and behaviorally, going forward? I don’t think this gets fixed in a single day. There’s going to be a lot of sprinting and testing, learning, and course correction.
On designing meetings for the people who aren’t in the conference room…
We got used to the level playing field of everybody being remote, certainly in information work. But the challenges of having a level playing field in meetings where some of the participants are in a room, some are in a different room, and some are remote are going to be far-reaching and not solved overnight. Will people on campus even want to travel to another building? Or will they just join meetings on Teams from their desk? As organizations, we’re learning who we are now.
I think ‘virtual first’ is a good way of thinking about things. We need to look to Teams and other vehicles to get a lot cleverer about how they enable a hybrid work experience so that meetings can be better. Today, when you’re working remotely, your screen shows tiny pictures of people in a very large meeting room, where it’s not possible to even work out who’s talking. The good news is that cameras and microphones are getting better. With Teams, AI will play a big part in more elegantly highlighting speakers and handling audio. The goal is to have much less of a preoccupation with getting the technology working and more focus on the actual meeting.
On another technology set to change how we work—the metaverse—and how ready companies are to adopt it…
When everything’s in three dimensions , that’s huge. That changes everything an organization has to think about how it portrays itself in the digital realm, because the digital realm has changed. That sounds a lot like when the internet came along, when the web came along. I think organizations that are quick to the metaverse will see it in prime time this year. But I think it will probably take a couple of years for enterprises to adopt it as broadly as we associate with, say, the web.
On the best advice he ever got…
If you’re under stress, prioritize. When you can’t prioritize, delegate.
