Data is central to every organization, and Microsoft is no different.

The company has a vision for transforming the way its employees use data—a vision that builds on a larger digital transformation strategy that Andrew Wilson, chief digital officer, has set for Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT and Operations division.

The Microsoft Digital Data team is leading the modernization of Microsoft Digital’s Enterprise Data Foundation to empower teams to turn connected enterprise data into intelligent experience. The Microsoft Digital Data team is comprised of data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts that are responsible for building and operating the shared Enterprise Data Foundation for Microsoft’s digital transformation.

“We’ve made a ton of progress in our journey to responsibly democratize data for Microsoft’s digital transformation,” says Karthik Ravindran, a principal group engineering manager on the Data team in Microsoft Digital. “We want to get to the point where all our employees can find, trust, and connect enterprise-wide data so they can develop insights pertinent to their digital transformation investments.”

Getting to this state requires evolving to a data-driven mindset with a change management journey that spans the enterprise’s people, culture, process, and technology.

“We are building a new data foundation for Microsoft,” Ravindran says. “Rather than requiring each team in Microsoft Digital to build and operate their own data infrastructure, we built a shared data foundation with the essential data management, security, compliance, and governance controls built in and standardized uniformly.”

[Learn how Microsoft powers digital transformation with modern data foundations. Check out how Microsoft designed a modern data catalog to enable business insights.]

Enabling data democratization at scale

Before Microsoft Digital adopted its modern data foundation strategy, data existed in a distributed state. Teams like Finance, Human Resources, and Supply Chain built and operated their own infrastructure to manage their data. This model enabled teams to run their own business units, but creating connected, intelligent experiences was much more challenging. If a team needed data, they had to find the team that owned the data and request access.

“To build and operate connected data products, the earlier process required significant engineering and operations efforts to discover and integrate data across multiple systems,” Ravindran says.

The Enterprise Data Lake and the data catalog in Microsoft Digital’s modern data foundation both address the opportunity to significantly optimize this effort and achieve the benefits of standardized enterprise data management, security, and compliance.

“We’re investing in an Enterprise Data Lake as the single destination for our enterprise-wide data as well as responsible democratization services and tools that our data analysts and data scientists can use to build data products and generate actionable insights,” Ravindran says. “This enables them to self-serve in discovering and using data at scale with enterprise-grade compliance and security.”

The Enterprise Data Lake is a multi-tenant platform that enables data publishers and data consumers to co-exist on the same foundation in their own workspaces and with governed data sharing. This reduces the need for data-consuming teams to invest in infrastructure for their data product development needs, and also reduces data sprawl and fragmentation in edge systems, barring controlled data caching infrastructure for performance efficiencies.

After data and data products are published to and discoverable in Microsoft’s data catalog, teams and users can access them from a single discovery and access subscription destination.

“Our goal is to enable all our teams to access the data that they need to deliver the best customer experiences and contribute to Microsoft’s growth, while upholding the highest standards for enterprise data management,” Ravindran says. “This is the essence of responsible data democratization.”

Using data to support end-to-end experiences

With the modern data foundation, teams can create intelligent experiences that are powered by connected trusted, secure, and compliant enterprise data.

For example, the End User Services Engineering team in Microsoft Digital used connected data and machine learning to improve the heating and cooling of Microsoft buildings. To optimize energy use, they determined when to turn on heating and ventilation systems based on signals and trends from employee badge scans at secured campus entry points, wireless data about when and where people connect to Wi-Fi, and telemetry data from the use of Microsoft Teams in conference rooms.

“We were able to bring these rich datasets together to create actionable insights, which helped our Real Estate and Facilities team and the End User Services Engineering team create the best experience for our employees while using our energy resources as efficiently as possible,” Ravindran says.

Another data-powered experience is Daily Recommender, which is a tool that enables sellers at Microsoft to effectively support their customers.

“Daily Recommender provides personalized and contextual customer recommendations that are based on over 1,000 data points per customer,” Ravindran says. “These data points include past purchases, marketing engagement, digital and local event attendance, and usage of products and services.”

Creating synergy across data initiatives

For Ravindran, modernizing Microsoft Digital’s data foundations has been a journey of enterprise change management.

“We’re still evolving our modern data foundation in Microsoft Digital,” Ravindran says. “We have about 70 percent of the organization on the path to decommissioning point infrastructure and onboarding to the shared foundation over the course of the next year. We expect to have the entire organization onboarded over the course of the next two years. This is a significant undertaking with an enterprise change management spanning multiple dimensions, and that makes it an incredibly rich learning experience.”

The Microsoft Digital modern data foundation strategy is also well-aligned with Microsoft’s Open Data Initiative and the enablement of Microsoft Azure Data platforms and services, which envisions bringing all of an enterprise’s data assets into a single system of intelligence that’s powered by one Enterprise Data Lake.

The Microsoft Digital Data team is also partnering with external Microsoft customers that are investing in modernizing their data foundation. The team shares solutions and practices to accelerate their transition. For Ravindran, it’s been exciting to see his Data team’s journey and investments resonate with customers.

“Many customers are seeking to address the same opportunities and challenges as in scaling enterprise data management and responsibly democratizing data,” Ravindran says. “It’s very energizing to help them adopt our solutions and learn from them as we evolve ours.”

Learn how Microsoft powers digital transformation with Modern Data Foundations.

Check out how Microsoft designed a modern data catalog to enable business insights.