Data Management Strategy at Microsoft

1

Where’s My Data and Who’s in Charge?

This first chapter delves into common business challenges stemming from the necessity of maintaining data quality and effective data management within a company. Often, there is either a complete absence of these practices or, at the very least, a partial implementation. This challenge typically impacts the end users of data the most, including sales, marketing, pre-sales, go-to-market, and finance teams. Meanwhile, the IT team tends to lag behind and might not even fully comprehend the issue until they are confronted with urgent user concerns.

This was notably the case for Microsoft in its early years of data enablement. The IT division had limited exposure to data-related problems as its focus was primarily ...