Data Management Strategy at Microsoft

6

Navigating the Strategic Data Dilemma

The need for outsourcing arose early on our path to driving data at scale. As soon as our team became even slightly global, we faced scalability needs, along with the requirement to reduce running costs. We already talked about this in previous chapters.

Much as expected, the early attempts were met with more failures than successes. We made all the mistakes that most enterprises would in their path toward outsourcing. Namely, we wanted it to be quick and easy and require minimal effort in terms of knowledge transitions from our side while finding that suppliers seemed to magically pick things up. These expectations of the company were exactly in line with any common “sales pitch deck” of any major outsourcing ...