Bain & Company builds new intellectual property management platform using Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365

Bain & Company (Bain) is a global consulting company, one of the top strategy consulting firms in the world. Over the nearly 50 years that Bain has been in business, the company has been a leader in the industry—a feat that requires constant reinvention. When its legacy internal knowledge system could no longer keep up with modern demands, the team at Bain took the opportunity to move to the cloud on Microsoft and redefine how it manages knowledge in the process. 

Knowledge is central to Bain’s operations. As a management consultancy, the team relies on access to its extensive intellectual property: past cases, expert insights, and practice points of view. For the past 20 years, that information lived in a custom platform that had morphed into a complex and diluted system. “It was custom coded to do very specific things for our superusers,” says Angela Varner, Vice President of Knowledge Systems at Bain. “But because of the complexity of the platform, it had become tough to maintain and update. People had lost the ability to find the information they were looking for on the platform.” 

It was time for an updated approach. “I want us to move at the velocity of the business; I call it business speed,” says Ramesh Razdan, Chief Information Officer of Bain. “We generally moved at an IT speed.” This was due to the platform’s complexity and age—the legacy software couldn’t take advantage of modern tools like AI and machine learning. The Bain team saw its next-generation knowledge platform as a critical differentiator in the market, so it used the migration to the cloud for a much-needed change. 

Finding a new road forward

The Bain team started using its requirements to narrow down the list of possible platform providers. “Bain was going through significant reinvention,” says Razdan. “So we needed a platform that would solve for the Bain of today rather than the Bain of yesterday.” 

“Some of the team’s core goals for the platform were for it to be modern, modular, and API-based—and to be something that could run and grow at business speed,” says Shawn Anderson, Senior Director for Enterprise Architecture at Avanade, a Microsoft partner helping Bain make the transition. 

“We already had a Microsoft stack embedded here,” says Ash Kanagat, Chief Enterprise Architect of Bain. That was a weighty factor in the decision—not only would staying in the Microsoft environment ease the learning curve for all parties but it would also streamline the platform’s integration into the business.

The team at Bain was focused on the user experience. “We wanted to make sure users had a very consistent experience from end to end. That’s one of the reasons why we put this custom web user interface on top of all of these Microsoft services,” says Anderson. “They all provided a great deal of power. We wanted that experience to be very specific to Bain’s way of doing business so that it could evolve with Bain.”

The breadth of Microsoft services clinched the decision. According to Anderson, “Using Microsoft made it a lot easier for the team members because they could focus on delivering business value rather than on finding some way to get the development done.” 

Building a new experience

After a 12-week discovery phase, the team kicked off work on the new platform, dubbed Iris, in early January 2020. By November 2020, Iris was in production: a native Microsoft Azure–based solution with hybrid architecture composed of microservices, the Coveo search engine, and a content management system. At the same time, the team was also deploying Microsoft 365, using apps like Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams to collaborate. “I think it’s a testament to all the Microsoft components working in harmony that we didn’t have any issues with deploying Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and ground-up task solutions like Iris,” says Kanagat. “We deployed all of these at the same time, and they were interdependent. We experienced no issues, and that itself speaks for the technology stack.”

All the backend services are accessible to users through a simple but powerful search tool that includes all their documents, profiles of experts and their subjects, practice documentation, and more. In addition to quickly accessing what they’re looking for, users can also look to Iris’s Opportunity Workspace feature, which proactively suggests resources based on the client’s specific need to give them a leg up. “Iris simplified and streamlined finding all this information,” says Anderson. “Users didn’t have to know what system it was in.”

As an added benefit, Iris has significantly modernized security so more users can access more knowledge. “Because we didn’t have security controls at a granular level in our legacy system, we were not opening up our knowledge system to more than a small ‎segment within Bain,” says Kanagat. “We have security controls now that we could not have in the old system. We have a secure mechanism by which we can expose the knowledge to all of Bain, yet we can track that it’s not being misused.” This new level of flexibility will also smooth Bain’s work with external partners. 

Reporting results

The Bain team has taken the charge to move at business speed seriously. Using its agile development methodology, it has pushed more than 29 code releases to Iris in 18 months. Varner and the team use a clearly defined set of key performance indicators and targets to assess tool adoption and performance, and this guides their priorities for future updates. 

Varner says the response has been positive: “We’ve heard from knowledge specialists that the platform saves them time that they can devote to helping teams with more advanced issues. And consultants say they love the self-service nature of the platform, can find things easily, and see high accuracy in the findings.” From the launch of the minimum viable product in November 2020 to Iris version 1.0 in November 2021, Bain’s employee satisfaction with the platform has increased by 60 percent.

Bain isn’t content to settle. Varner already has a list of ideas for future improvements, including using the Microsoft Graph API to chart relationships between content and people and applying machine learning from Microsoft Viva to power contextual knowledge surfacing. The team is looking forward to extending Iris’s seamless user journey to all the different applications that business users might need for their daily work and collaboration at Bain. “When we started with Iris, we didn’t have Microsoft Teams deployed. We now use Teams extensively at Bain for collaboration needs,” says Razdan. “And there are additional opportunities to bring additional value to our employees. That’s part of our continuing journey with Microsoft.”