Saturday, October 29, 2016

Why organization does not take the benefits from Office 365 new features?

Benefit from Microsoft Office 365 evergreeness

How often your organization Office 365 Service Manager has visited on the following page explaining the Office 365 roadmap Office 365 Roadmap ?



Very simple questions what every CIO should ask from the team. "Hi Team, please explain the new features m & functions Microsoft is releasing from Office 365 and included to our current subscriptions with no financial impact?"

Unfortunately the answer can be something what the CIO does not expect to get and this is a huyge problem and slow down the organization's path to digital master or journey to digital workplace, and impacting to the the user daily work and perfomance.

Based on this the CIO might also ask a question why we moved to cloud if our internal behavior in evergreen service is based on working and collaboration with the local outsourcing provider on the history, where nothing came free and it was also project to upgrade the version or add new services.

How we realize the cloud benefits?

How we support our business and how they benefits from new services in their daily work?

So, couple great question for CIO's table and team agenda - but this is not the end - it just the start.

CIO is responsible to offer services witch usually equals to financial costs and here we should change the hat and think this from CFO side.

The CFO might ask from CIO that how the benefits, TCO and ROI are based on the business case and based on his/her knowledge from cloud he/she should be also interested of the cost versus benefits to avoid paying from nothing. If i would be CFO i really like to know that if we are paying the next 3 years fixed price per month per user from the service in contract sign date but the service will have more richer features available with no cost. So you would get more with same money but you don't want and use them. This is like investing money, put one million dollar to shares and in the next three years we are not interested of dividend or the appreciation of the shares- No No, we just want to get our 1 million dollars back after three years.

Sounds scary if CFO will accept this type of spending but again unfortunately through. So some very actully stupid question from financial point like

How much we are paying without using the features and services available for free? (Like owning and retail but not renting that, just keeping it warm and clean and paying from the insurance and
electric - you got the point)

Next questions is a little bit tougher and requires good understanding from the organization's business and employees and how we personalized or profiles those. Below is very very small analysis for three years using user based monthly subscription and what is the impact if done in more detailed way even that it take more time to established.

In our Office365-Expert organization we 34 000 Information worker, 10 000 field worker and 20 000 factory worker.


So we can clearly see the financial benefits from user profiling but of course this does not come for free and requires hard work and have extra cost to do the required changes in the existing legacy solution and IAM systems.

The user profiling partially brings on the table the third part - the business and it's VP's, Executives and so on, from where everything starts.
Without business there is no demand for any IT services - none, njet, no, Ei.... but also thinking other side how IT can be business enabler and enrich the users daily work and work performance or generate totally new business opportunities.

So pragmatically we have three CxO level persons who don't know or have the visibility how the increase the user performance witch is the key, how to be more innovative and collaborate more, not the technology.

couple questions the board of executives can think might be like

How we collaborate globally?
How we found right resource to support the business using our tools?
How we share information at the right time and way?
How we simplify our technical architecture and utilize more cloud services?
How we build the model to share the business requires and Office 365 new services aligned with financials?
How we can utilize Office 365 in our journey to EU GDPR compliance
Do we use other cloud based applications like SalesForce and ServiceNow witch can be configured to use Azure AD for user authentication?
Do we have services witch can be replaced with Office 365 and out of the box features included in our monthly prices?


To be able to realize the evergreen cloud services benefits you need drive and have the ownership for the change, You can call it Center of Excellence, Cloud Excellence, Digital Excellence  and they key is the team with talents from different technologies like Office 365 is based on, it starts from identity and security and goes through communication and collaboration to analytics and software development skilled people from your own organization or from selected partner.

For the change you need the boost and right attitude like the blower below above the V8. You cannot get speed and horsepower for free and same works in organization, instead you need to make investment and in digital work learn how to fail and learn from it and do it faster and faster parallel to create business value or more speed :-)

Car show Helsinki Finland
All pictures and thoughts are my own

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