James Gray

Join Microsoft IT Solution Delivery As a Trusted Strategic Advisor to Our Business

The Microsoft IT Solutions Delivery organization is looking for people to help us reach our potential.

The role of a Senior Solution Manager is to become the CIO of our clients. By helping them shape their long-term strategy and build technology solutions to enable the business, we can achieve trusted advisor status and earn our seat at the table. We partner with groups such as Human Resources, Operations, Sales & Marketing, Legal, Services and OEM which gives us a great opportunity as an organization to see the landscape of Microsoft. In partnership with Engineering, our organization has built some exciting tools & processes which have streamlined how we do business ranging from sales opportunity identification and contact management, recruiting and staffing, and processing of sales agreements and service contracts to name just a few.

We are looking for individuals with the ‘customer first’ mindset that have a proven track record in problem solving, strategy development, project management, innovative thinking, cross group collaboration, conflict negotiation and an ability to drive for results through influence and relationship building.
The solution manager will act as a functional process owner. This role includes project planning, business requirement definition and management and ensuring that the IT deliverables meet the customer’s expectations. This position requires an attention to detail on system requirements while still being able to understand the long-term vision of both our business partners and our IT architecture. The Senior Solution Manager also needs to be able to map the current projects into a broader, long-term integration strategy.

The applications under this process umbrella are far reaching in scope and visible to the Microsoft executive team. Subsequently, this is an opportunity for broad exposure to many teams and executives throughout Microsoft.

Apply online for this role or feel free to contact me at james.gray@microsoft.com if you are interested in discussing career opportunities with Microsoft's Solution Delivery organization.

See all open jobs on Microsoft's Career site. 

IT as a Premier BI Solutions Provider

The TDWI Wayne’s World post on “Evolving Your BI Team from a Data Provider to a Solutions Provider” provided a nice summary on some of the reasons why IT serves as just a data provider and how to evolve into a solutions provider. This topic is near and dear to my heart so I thought I would share some additional insights as a practitioner delivering BI solutions inside Microsoft.

In my view, IT must serve the business as a trusted advisor by delivering end-to-end information-enabled solutions while also providing a secure, scalable, and reliable BI platform for the business to innovate in areas where IT cannot or should not expect to serve.  It is unrealistic that IT can cost effectively serve all of the needs given my practical experience so you need a strong collaborative partnership with the business to serve the growing thirst for strategic information and analytics.  This includes leadership and credibility to deliver enterprise solutions but to also enable them to deliver their own solutions using IT’s platform.

My vision for enabling the business to deliver solutions is not about the business replicating data and developing applications in isolation from IT.  Success in my opinion is IT delivering valuable end-to-end solutions and a certified integrated data platform that can be used by the business to also deliver solutions where and when needed.  This is a collaborative model leveraging both the strengths of IT and the business.

While I do believe it's essential for IT to deliver end-to-end solutions for long-term viability, I do view providing the business with a certified data platform as a "solution" as they would generally prefer not to be in the data integration business.  While this could be considered IT acting as a data provider, my experience tells me that IT is solving a huge problem by standardizing and integrating data into compelling offering that can quickly support decision support and analytics across the entire organization. Think about the huge opportunity cost when the business is spending their valuable time on hard core IT and not analyzing and understanding your customers, partners, market competition, and internal operations.   The extreme cases of IT or the business doing it all is not realistic and there is a optimal position somewhere in between where IT focuses on the complex enterprise-level opportunities while enabling the business to innovate on the fringe.

Microsoft’s business intelligence environment is diverse including both IT solutions and business solutions. Maturing the information strategy is journey and there is no silver bullet so this requires strong leadership and phased approach.  

Data Provider

IT can act as a data provider in two scenarios:  

1. Enabling direct data access to transactional systems
2. Serving integrated data in the form of marts and cubes

We have both of these scenarios in Microsoft today.  Let’s face it, in many companies the business built the shadow solutions they have today because they likely had a need that was not being served by IT at a specific point in time. In certain cases the business has built solutions by integrating data served by low level interfaces and bypassing IT completely (scenario #1).  While this approach can address the immediate business need, the result is higher lifecycle costs due to data replication, needed changes to support corporate taxonomies and upstream data sources. 

Strategies to Transform IT into a Premier Solutions Provider

Here are ten strategies for evolving IT from a data provider to a premier solutions provider:

1. Strong IT Leadership – transforming an organization, it's offering and results requires strong leadership. Evolving to a true solutions provider will require trusting relationships with business executives that understand and value IT’s offering. Transformations do not happen overnight so leadership is required to sustain the journey and deliver on IT’s promises over time.
2. Mature a solutions-focused organization – establish a trusted advisor organization within IT that is responsible for managing the business relationship, business architecture, understanding and anticipating needs of the user community, delivering solutions that enable complex end-to-end business scenarios, and leading change management. It’s also critical that the solutions organization understands the data and ensures data quality. These change agents must clearly define the business value of the solution and then measure and communicate the benefits after the solution is deployed.  Our organization inside Microsoft IT is called “Solutions Delivery” which reinforces our mission: "Earn Trusted Partnership status by consistently delivering high value innovative business solutions".  This team represents IT on behalf of the engineering and operations teams that deliver and support the applications.
3. Differentiate and market IT’s solution - similar to any other product offering there needs to be something compelling that truly differentiates IT's solution.  Evaluate what IT is offering and understand what is driving the business to invest in their own solutions.  Position capabilities that can be best delivered by IT and not easily replicated by the business including data quality and report certification, enterprise-wide integration and analytics that enable a broad business view (multi-business solutions), embedding integrated data into IT applications, and a holistic information management solution set. Track and communicate the business value derived from IT's solution as part of the continued marketing communications process to drive brand recognition.
4. Manage and predictably deliver on solution roadmaps - with a IT solutions organization in place, develop and manage solution roadmaps that include the business capabilities, features, and solutions that will be delivered on over the 1-3 year time frame. The roadmaps should support "priority" business capabilities where there is a high strategic importance but low performance.  Establish credibility with the business by delivering on-time, on-schedule, and on-budget.  That is the ticket to the game to advancing to higher value business solutions.  The business is not going to give up their solutions until they have confidence that IT can predictably deliver the goods.
5. Embed integrated data and analytics into business process applications – at the end of the day business value is only realized when users take action from insight. IT is uniquely positioned to deliver key information and analytical models into the applications that run the business and serving end users.  Delivering on this promise requires strong collaboration inside of IT between the data warehousing/BI specialists and those organizations that own the transactional applications.
6. Enable the enterprise perspective with multi-business solutions - most business BI solutions are targeted at specific problems or business capabilities within a business of a large organization.  The most strategic insight can only be realized when there is an enterprise IT data platform in place that integrates data across a broad set of transactional systems that run the company. IT should focus on delivering the enterprise scope data platform and delivering BI solutions that serve multiple businesses as this will be difficult for a business group to replicate.  A few years ago Microsoft started the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) journey to mature it's internal and external insight as well as consolidate the application portfolio to reduce costs and quickly adapt to changing business models.
7. Understand user needs - compelling IT solutions can only be delivered by understanding the pain points and needs of the employees executing business processes.  Proactively engage and research the needs of both the corporate and field user base. Understand the roles that you are serving and what solutions they need for their job.  This will help proactively focus IT on what "markets" to attack.
8. Pro-actively reduce data access - easy access to transactional data, feeds, and integrated data perpetuates the growth of shadow applications around the company. Periodically assess the reasons why non-IT applications are integrating transactional data and aggressively reduce access by providing alternatives such as IT's BI solutions and integrated data platform. 
9. Engage the “Developer Network” - successfully executing a hybrid strategy where IT delivers solutions as well as the business can be accelerated when you can harness the power of the distributed network of "developers" across the organization.  The business is going to deliver solutions with our without IT so my view is that IT's strategy should be to build a platform that can used by both IT and stakeholders in the business. Formalize this collaborative and social network that is geographically distributed to quickly surface best practices, data issues, and deliver on BI needs quickly. Members of the "developer network" would be formally approved and get access to sanctioned integrated data and IT services. I envision a robust social network where "information" is the lifeblood of the conversation and user needs are served quickly and cost-effectively by the "developer network" (both IT and approved business developers).
10. Empower the business on IT infrastructure – IT will never have all of the data required by the business so it’s essential that IT provide a collaborative solution that enables the business to manage data on IT’s infrastructure and mitigate the need for the business to replicate data in their environment. There will also be scenarios where the business will need to have quick bridging solutions so providing capabilities to enable agility and access to IT’s certified data set will reinforce IT’s vision as a customer-focused organization. Recently, we have enabled a set of capabilities on our Enterprise Data Warehouse infrastructure that enables the business to co-locate and manage their business data on IT servers.  We believe this will reduce data replication outside of IT, reduce shadow applications, improve insight into user needs and enable the business to deliver niche solutions.

Run your IT shop as a business and act as a change agent by delivering valuable end-to-end solutions across the organization!

IT's Role in Delivering BI for the Masses

As a IT practitioner delivering enterprise information and analytical solutions inside of Microsoft, I am very impressed by our business intelligence product strategy including the upcoming releases of SQL Server 2008 R2, SharePoint 2010 and Excel 2010.  The opportunity to put BI capabilities in the hands of information workers could not be greater as recently outlined in the InformationWeek article Global CIO: Microsoft Pushes BI For The Masses: 500 Million Prospects -- InformationWeek.

I see the role of IT as both an infrastructure provider as described in the article but also a trusted advisor that serves as a change agent to derive the value of the BI investment across the organization. A powerful self-service BI strategy is not for IT just to provide data to the masses.  The upcoming Microsoft releases set the foundation for a powerful self-service BI strategy when IT assumes the following responsibilities in partnership with the business:

• Act as trusted advisor – IT must have a deep understanding of the business to deliver solutions that are required today and anticipate future needs.  
• Understand personas and self-service scenarios – IT must conduct user centered research to validate the roles, information needs and scenarios that establish the set of data and capabilities that must be delivered.
• Drive an enterprise perspective – IT must drive and facilitate an enterprise perspective to data modeling and integration.  This will ensure IT can deliver on both line of business and enterprise scenarios.
• Enable a collaborative network- the power of information and analytics is when you have a highly connected set of end-users that can share content, insight, and best practices across the organization. IT should enable this community to collaborate using SharePoint 2010 as a foundation and harness the power of the hearts and minds of these change agents across the company.
• Ensure data quality – the delivery of timely, high quality data is required for business users to have confidence using the information for decision making and insight.  IT must integrate data quality processes into the self-service strategy and pro-actively communicate the data quality status and issues to the user base.
• Integrate BI capabilities into business process enabled applications – IT can drive high-levels of adoption by integrating self-service analytical solutions into the familiar applications relied on by users everyday.
• Manage critical, highly standardized BI content -  every organization will have reports and analytical solutions that require formal control and distribution.  IT should focus their expertise on delivering this highly standardized enterprise content and enable self-service for ad-hoc, highly flexible and custom solutions.
• Master data management services – putting the management of business rules and data in the hands of business users is an important element of self service.  IT should integrate the use of SQL Server Master Data Services (MDS) into the solutions and enable the agile business to govern this data.
• Services to co-locate IT and business data– IT systems will likely never include all of the data required for information and analytical solutions.  We have started to roll-out a set of capabilities in our EDW platform that enables the business to master and manage business-owned data (e.g. models) on IT servers. This approach reduces data replication and shadow applications, as well as enabling self-service for business users to augment the data and BI solutions.
• Change Management– self-service can thrive when information workers and highly skilled analysts are operating with the sanctioned, single version of the truth data set. IT must facilitate the change processes that migrate users from the shadow solutions under their desk to the secure enterprise solution. PowerPivot for SharePoint provides a great set of capabilities for users to collaborate using enterprise data assets and IT to monitor and manage the infrastructure.

Why Business Executives Should Care about a High-Level Data Model

The Information Management post Why Business Executives Should Care about a High-Level Data Model provides a good reminder why business stakeholder involvement is critical to an information strategy. Strong business engagement from the executive level and down is required to ensure the data represents the business and this shared representation is consistent across the organization.  Data models are clearly the foundational prerequisite to transforming towards an analytical culture. A key point from an execution view is the trap that companies fall into by taking a "project" or "line of business" approach to their information strategy and data modeling. The result is siloed solutions that do not enable powerful analytics across the entire organization.

At Microsoft we have begun a multi-year journey to holistically model data that enables key decision-making processes across the sales and marketing organization.  Our approach to the data modeling process is collaborative including key members from the business, business architects, information architects, solution managers and program managers. Although a "project" may be driving the data model for specific subject areas, these projects are steps in the roadmap to building out our Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW).  Microsoft's EDW standardizes and integrates data to eliminate legacy siloed solutions managed by both IT and the business. The business outcomes include reduced costs, sales and marketing productivity, and improvements in customer and partner satisfaction.

Our progress over the last few months has reinforced how powerful business engagement is to standardizing data model definitions across multiple sales and marketing operating models that in the past have operated independently. Strong business and IT leadership is a catalyst for this collaborative approach to our data modeling process and the journey to integrating the organization silos that exist today.

Exploring Search for Business Intelligence

Discovering certified information in the enterprise for insight and decision making is a challenging task for any large company.  Business leaders and employees all have a need for timely, accurate and relevant information to drive competitive advantage.  My experience is that even though a rich set of reports and analytics may exist within a company, many information workers may not know where to access this information or what information is available.  This can often result in the growth of redundant IT-owned applications and shadow applications in the business.

Recently I have begun researching how to to improve information delivery to a worldwide sales and marketing organization across Microsoft with the goal of driving use of certified information from Microsoft's Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW).  The large user base includes business leaders in a corporate role who need a global view of business metrics and employees who may need a subsidiary or business segment view.  One area of research includes the use of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search and a Microsoft report catalog to provide relevant search results based on user attributes and report meta data. The vision is to enable any employee to quickly access highly relevant certified information (e.g. pipeline, partner profile) from Microsoft's main internal SharePoint site.

I look forward to collaborating with others who have successfully used search for business intelligence and I will plan to share the progress and outcomes of my research.

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