Microsoft Modern Service Management®

Multi-Cloud Strategies – Do they work?

John.M.Clark — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 14:36:32 GMT

We are often asked about our thoughts on multi-cloud, cloud-neutral, and cloud brokerage strategies. Or we work with customers whose strategy is already established multi-cloud. From a Modern Service Management (MSM) point of view, which starts with Agile/DevOps, our principles apply to any cloud as they do in Microsoft Azure. We would seek to enable “cloud born/native” services in AWS or Google, as we would in Azure, in lieu of approaching them generically or from the lowest common denominator functionality such as just Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) or non-cloud native tools.

Beyond cloud vendors themselves such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google, there is an entire industry of firms desiring to get into the cloud game by creating solutions to problems customers haven’t even experienced yet. This leads to the question: “Why do organizations feel the need to leverage multiple cloud providers simultaneously for similar or dissimilar purposes?”

Some arguments include;

all cloud vendors are alike
that perhaps it feels good to “share the wealth”
there are capabilities in one that are not found in the others
the fear of the dreaded “vendor lock-in”
organizations believe that like oil futures, they can platform applications based on price advantages or pitting cloud providers against one another,
workloads can easily be moved back and forth between cloud providers.

The problem is that most (not all) of these arguments actually begin to eat themselves once you get past non-differentiated, commodity services such as IaaS and containers. It is those differentiated services and capabilities such as Platform as a Service (Paas), Functions as a Service (Faas) or Software as a Service (Saas), that a specific cloud may offer that provides the most value and benefit.

There is also a cost and potential value impact with a multi-cloud strategy. The following costs have been discussed over time from a number of internal community threads, presentations and discussions on multi-cloud and cloud brokerage;

A cost in management ~ you have to manage and learn to manage two platforms as opposed to one
A cost in upskilling/cost in investing in multi-cloud tools
An opportunity cost if multi-cloud tools prevent you from leveraging high value services in a given cloud
Bandwidth costs and lost time moving mass amounts of data to/from each cloud provider
Upskilling costs to take advantage of multiple clouds deeply (i.e. using their specific PaaS services and ecosystems) then there is obviously an even higher upskilling cost.
If instead, you take a lowest common denominator approach then you also have an opportunity cost as you are unable to leverage the higher value services that each cloud offers. The opportunity costs of going lowest common denominator on 2+ clouds quickly outweighs perceived advantages and constrains modernization.

Additional reasons for going multi-cloud break down when you dig into them;

There is no simple migrate capability, especially for Paas and Saas, between clouds, so once workloads have landed then they tend to stay put, and the cost of re-factorization can be high
For most workloads the pain, risk and cost of moving between clouds far outweighs the ongoing marginal cost benefits once the workload has been migrated.
Attempting to play vendors off against each other for advantaged pricing usually doesn’t yield anticipated saving because of current state IT procurement processes. This only works if you are an enormous cloud consumer like Netflix as pricing is fixed based on features, and most companies have insufficient leverage.
The concern for “Vendor lock-in” should be compared to the either direct or indirect cost of lock-in from an outsourcer or SI (a lock in of sorts). In many cases, it may cost less to refactor applications over time to run natively in the cloud compared to transitioning large portions of outsourcing contracts to support applications back on-premises or into IaaS. This starts to unveil the real cost of “technical debt”

Multi-cloud approaches may prove to be short lived with customers focusing on Iaas and Containers only. As many organizations discover, the true value of cloud comes from modernizing IT and re-factoring applications to take advantage of value-added services that a cloud provides. We believe over time, organizations will most likely embrace and choose a primary cloud provider and stick with them to leverage the services and ecosystem fully. Especially as applications are modernized or re-factored to take full advantage of that cloud’s PaaS, Faas and SaaS capabilities.

Some will settle on a couple of clouds as they are big enough to invest the time and people to go deep on both, and that makes sense if the clouds offer differentiated value beneficial to the workload, but only if you go in deeply with both and take advantage of the PaaS services that each offers. It is well advised that if an organization chooses to have a multi-cloud strategy, workload placement criteria be managed by the company’s IT enterprise/solution/platform architecture team to take advantage of the capabilities in each cloud, not to attempt to place or manage workloads randomly.

Do 3rd Party Multi-Cloud Management solutions help?

Purchasing solutions to problems you may not even have yet, borders on insanity. Often customers will “lock-in” to a boutique solution capability that claims multi-cloud, only to find out that it;

limits or doesn’t support the modern workloads that customers are looking to achieve, or
It is focused on traditional data center extension into the cloud

Our recommendation leveraging Azure (or any cloud) is to provision using automation that supports true CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code, even at just the platform level (if all you use is Common-Off-The-Shelf software, or COTS). This approach makes a big difference over manual efforts. Multi-cloud solutions often only target infrastructure provisioning and don’t address or support PaaS or SaaS services. Therefore, the requirements and justification for them tends to fade as you go deeper into a clouds service offerings.

Ask yourself; “What problems do these tools solve that aren’t solved already in each cloud?” If through a given approach to cloud we free up 60% of an application developer, system integrator or architect’s time, what is the value of additional tool sets when the cloud native solutions from Microsoft or other cloud providers work better for their cloud? Any solutions that reduce speed or limit scale should obviously be avoided. Azure, and other cloud services, move and change quickly – and 3rd party solutions have to keep up to manage the integrations and front-end security, etc.

Our recommendations

If you have started multi-cloud ask yourself what your platforming algorithms are? How do you make decisions and do these make business sense? Consider the cost of complexity, the cost of not using value added Paas and Serverless services, the value of modernization vs the cost of managing Iaas VMs in multiple clouds. You might find that the agility, speed and scale of these services far outweighs the value in your goals of just moving VMs to the cloud.
If you haven’t started to go mult-cloud but are planning it, recognize there will be additional costs and there are no magic cloud management tools that do everything across all clouds. Cloud services are too numerous and change too fast for these solutions to keep up with and they only usually focus on infrastructure only vs driving Paas services.
Wait until you have deployed cloud-based solutions taking a modern approach to cloud, before purchasing these tools. If you take a traditional data center extension approach to cloud, yes, there may be lots of reasons for these solutions.
- A modern approach is based on automated cloud native controls, automation in testing, and release and infrastructure as code. See if the problems you believe these tools claim to solve are really that great of problems and perform a business analysis at that point.
- The problems may be addressed natively and in some cases at no charge, by the cloud provider directly.
Most importantly, make sure you fully understand the cloud platform(s) you are on and the capabilities it(they) provides. If you are looking at 3rd party cloud management or consolidation tools, make sure they are addressing the capabilities you are seeking to leverage. For example, if your goal is to go Serverless with Azure Logic Apps, Functions, and CosmosDB, ask yourself what value does an additional tool on top of those do? What value does it bring? Remembering that an unintended consequence of these tools may include a friction in release velocity, or how often you can update or limit access to the services of the cloud provider.

Optimizing Outsourcing with Cloudsourcing

Paul Evert Fijnvandraat — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 13:14:52 GMT

The key to successful “Cloud Sourcing” is to first realize that the type and scope of services, used for classic outsourcing vs service required for adoption and use of public cloud services, are different. Changing the type and scope of outsourcing services has an impact on the type of relationship between customer and outsourcer and on how value, scope and risk are perceived.

Outsourcing “avant la lettre”

Traditionally, many IT (infrastructure) outsourcers first assess current state (due diligence), agree upon customer’s desired state, and then define transformation and transition plan to deliver the desired state using standardized IT services. Centrally controlled IT functions such as project, program and service management are applied throughout execution of the outsourcing contract to assure that projects stay within agreed budget, scope and risk. A classical Business/IT demand supply chain and scope of IT outsourcing is depicted in Diagram 1 below. Diagram 1. Typical cumbersome business/IT demand supply chain with numerous hand offs and classic scope of IT outsourcing With this approach, many organizations have experienced slow and poor service delivery and service operations, resulting in a deteriorated relationship between business and IT. This disconnect and poor outcomes result in business units (particularly of larger enterprises) establishing their own IT environments, without explicit approval of the established IT governance (a.k.a shadow IT), since desired innovations are not reaching the business quick enough, if at all.

“Cloud Sourcing” opportunity

Services available from public cloud providers facilitate rapid response to changing business needs. Business units love value delivered by solutions delivered from innovative public cloud services. It’s this value and outcome-based development that should drive and define the use of public cloud services. To achieve this, solutioning must be aligned closely with the business. Visibility and transparency into what’s being solutioned is essential to make sure the value and outcome serves their needs (as depicted in Diagram 2 below). Organizations seeking to be successful in exploiting innovative public cloud services, need to shift operational responsibilities and IT delivery capabilities. Functions must be moved from the IT organization to autonomous agile development teams. “Cloud Sourcing” should facilitate autonomous iterative outcome based solutioning to facilitate rapid response to changing business needs. “Cloud Sourcing” should focus on delivering the capabilities (people, process and technology) that make this autonomous use of public cloud services possible. Some examples of IT delivery capabilities that support autonomous, or ‘Cloud Native’ solutioning are automated policy enforcement and zero touch deployment using pre-packaged / certified (by the organization, execute only) deployment code (infrastructure as code), which is published in a product marketplace for re-use by DevOps teams in release pipelines. Diagram 2. Typical business/IT aligned outcome based solutioning (BizDevOps) and the shift of the outsourcing scope (“Cloud Sourcing”)

Impact on outsourcing and outsourcers

Shifting operational responsibilities and IT delivery capabilities is not an easy task, it requires a different approach for outsourcing partners to fulfill customer requirements. To survive in the “Cloud Sourcing” world, traditional outsourcing partners need to start providing services that focus on business outcomes. Services that help customers build, operate and maintain solutions autonomously in an agile way while infusing risk, security, compliance and service management policies. Customers often struggle to find outsourcers that facilitate autonomous, iterative, outcome based solutioning that focuses on delivering the capabilities (people, process and technology) supporting autonomous use of public cloud services. “Cloud Sourcing” makes the (lack of) real value that outsourcers deliver far more visible and tangible. In the traditional world, the lack of value delivered can be obscured by the complex processes and interactions that have been created to deliver their services. It seems as if outsourcers aren’t eager to leave their current, profitable, business model (which sounds like the old story of “Who Moved My Cheese”). It’s just a matter of time before these outsourcers realize that this is moving their cheese rapidly, and when they do it will be too late.

Conclusion

Outsourcing is not over. Now more than ever, customers need the right expertise onboard to get true value from the Public Cloud in the modern IT world. Outsourcing should shift towards enabling customer value and focus on outcome-based development with full transparency and visibility into what’s being worked on. This implies that outsourcers will have to move up the stack from building, running and maintaining IT infrastructure towards creating a platform, products and services that support ‘Agile’ or ‘Cloud Native’ development by various business teams. The relationship between customers and outsourcers will have to evolve from customer/supplier to a partnership that’s built on trust (intent, integrity, capability and results) and collaboration. Microsoft is helping both customers and partners to move to this modern IT world, by providing customers and outsourcers with these cloud native capabilities while driving the organizational and cultural change that’s required to make use of autonomous solutioning. Feel free to reach out to a Microsoft Account Executive or Technical Account Manager if you think your cheese is moving…and only if you really want to change TODAY and invest in it! Authors Note: I’d like to say a big thank you to Pascal Platteel (ABN AMRO IT Services, Product Engineering Strategy) for being a co-writer of this blog!

Do not (just) take care of IT

Paul Evert Fijnvandraat — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 04:57:13 GMT

There are these things in life that one needs to do once a year, that no one likes to do at all. For me one of these things is Taxes! I don’t do it often enough to get the habit of it, so I finally hired a specialist to take care of it. It’s really relaxing to know that this specialist takes my pile of papers and “takes care of it”. However, I discovered that “taking care of it” isn’t enough when you arrive in more dynamic financial circumstances. Just “taking care of it”, i.e. “making sure everything that has to be declared is declared”, does not cover the need to have a regular conversation about what is or isn’t the smart thing to do and act accordingly (e.g. avoid profit tax through investing just enough). So, I learned that by hiring the specialist in the past, I lost a lot of experience myself and didn’t realize that through automation and intelligent software, I can do a lot myself without having to consult this specialist! Over the last two decades, many organizations got tired of having to maintain their IT infrastructure and applications. They hired specialists (outsourcers) to take care of their applications to make sure they could fulfill business, legal, regulatory, functional and technical requirements. However, in more dynamic circumstances (e.g. increased global competition, everything digital, systemic automation, rapid innovation), just letting such an outsourcer “take care of IT” does not address the increased business demand for digital innovation. In fact, more and more organizations see these outsourcing agreements as major blockers for innovation. It is important for these organizations to realize that nowadays, through systemic automation and intelligent software (cloud services, beyond hosted VMs), they can do a lot themselves without having to consult these specialists (outsourcers) and with minimal effort, compared to a decade ago. Einstein stated decades ago: “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.”. Translated to IT outsourcing, contracting an outsourcer to deal with the increasing business demand for innovation won’t do the trick. Many IT outsourcing contracts weren’t a result of strategic business decisions, but more punitive in nature: the “your mess for less” mentality against costly single source IT. And at the time it perhaps made sense – technology “Streets and sewers” could be maintained by the lowest bidders. Streets and sewers are table stakes for every organization. The cloud changes that model providing more efficient, cost effective and modern streets and sewers that don’t require the maintenance and operations, as well as other city infrastructure that allows the business to leverage and focus technology decisions for strategic purposes, such as digitally transforming their entire business model. Agility cannot be achieved without engaging business leaders, management and the user community. Agile methodologies require continuous engagement with business managers and users, where a continuous stream of new and modified software is delivered into the operational environment. This requires significant change in working practices for both business governance and relationship management, and the infrastructure and operations teams. Translated to outsourcing, risk sharing and common business objectives will be key to success. The service provider needs to subscribe to the customer vision and work towards a solution approach. The service provider is no longer the classic outsourcer but needs to become/behave as a valued partner. Changing attitude from being “one of them”, providing supporting services, to being “one of us”, contributing to our joint success is a big, important shift in thinking and relationship (from them to us!). A partner does not just take care of IT, they are vested in your business success! The takeaway of this all: It’s essential to reconsider your sourcing strategy and model when facing increased business demand for digital innovation! Paul Fijnvandraat started at Microsoft in January 2011 as Technical Presales and moved to Microsoft Consulting Services in October 2013 as Principal Consultant. Prior to joining Microsoft he was Chief Technology Officer on a large outsourcing contract for HP Enterprise Services. He has been working in IT for almost 30 years within various roles. As principal consultant he supports enterprise customers by translating their business and IT objectives into changes needed in their organization, processes, technology and people in complex heterogenic environments. In his own words: "Creating breakthroughs in paradigms, beliefs and behaviors that deliver business value outcomes.”.

A Modern Service Management View On Why Office 365 Is So Important

Carroll Moon — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 07:04:10 GMT

There are so many great reasons for Enterprises to adopt Office 365. All of the normal benefit-statements are relevant. Office 365 is Secure. Office 365 allows users to be more productive. Office 365 is an Evergeen-service that is always current. Office 365 enables users from anywhere on any device. Office 365 allows IT to focus on the business rather than on delivering utility IT Services like Email. All of those reasons are extremely valid. In this post, however, I want to take a look at the value of Office 365 from a Modern Service Management viewpoint. When looked at through the Modern Service Management lens, Office 365 can and should be a conduit to enabling the business for Digital Transformation in all areas, not just in productivity. To set the stage, let me first take a step back to opine on different views of the cloud held by different IT organizations. No matter the type of team (Basketball, Cricket, Information Technology), every team takes on the personality of its leader. IT is no exception. IT organizations take on the personality of their leaders who are the CIOs. In my experience, there are two types of CIOs: former IT Operations leaders and former Business (or development) leaders. Operations CIOs, in my experience, view the cloud as an extension of their datacenters with the potential to increase scale and reduce costs. Business and Development CIOs view the cloud as an enabler of business value through feature sets and agility that would be prohibitive in-house. Obviously, both views are valid. The best view is to have a combination of the two views: Cloud is an enabler of transformative initiatives and the Cloud is an extension of the customer datacenter allowing all sorts of benefits. Let’s take a step back even further to define Digital Transformation through the Modern Service Management lens. Digital Transformation means different things to different people. When asked, I define Digital Transformation in the following way: businesses are under increasing pressure to compete and to achieve higher profits. There are two ways to accomplish higher profits: make more money and decrease costs. In order to go after higher revenues and decreased costs, businesses are innovating. In today’s world, most innovations involve [Technology] Services. And if every competitor is innovating, speed is a key factor in winning. There are six statements of truth that I like to walk through:

Computing power is infinite and inexpensive…big compute is no longer reserved to universities; Azure makes virtually infinite power available to all
Storage is infinite and inexpensive...we no longer need big in-house storage arrays to archive our data thanks to Azure
Physical devices are powerful and inexpensive…when was the last time you met someone not carrying a smartphone? IoT devices are very inexpensive.
Networks are prevalent and inexpensive…we can use high-speed internet access on airplanes
Cloud enables new scenarios for everyone…several years ago, Machine Learning power was accessible by only a few, but now, garage developers can access the power of the Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite
DevOps makes it all go faster…DevOps, when done right, allows for innovation at the speed of business…gone are the days of waiting months for procurement of hardware, and gone are the days of waiting for code to “burn in” before moving it to production

Given the six bullets above, there are amazing opportunities for businesses. The downside for businesses is that the same six bullets are available to everyone. That means that the bullets are true for every business’ competitors too. Cost of entry to create transformational digital services is extremely low. In some respects, that means that the ultimate winners in every industry will be those who a) have the best ideas, b) are the best at execution, and c) are the best at integrating the transformational services with their existing services. All of that probably sounds great, but the billion-dollar-point for every enterprise is that “we have an entire IT Portfolio to manage and that Portfolio (and our business’ reliance on the applications therein) does not go way just because of a couple of new IT Services”. Let’s dig into the IT Portfolio a little bit. Most enterprises have between 500 and 5000 named applications in their IT Portfolio. Every one of those applications needs a story for modernization in the cloud and DevOps world. If my Portfolio had 1200 applications, and if I modernize one application per month, it will take me 100 years to complete the modernization exercise. Clearly, a 100-year modernization project is not feasible given the speed requirements in most enterprises. New ideas are required to make this topic more manageable. To that end, it is important to look at the IT Portfolio as “classes” of applications. There are four key classes:

Software as a Service. Most readers will understand what SaaS represents. Just like with Exchange Online, the Service is delivered by the provider. IT’s role is to integrate the SaaS Services with the rest of the IT Portfolio--data connectivity, auditability, monitoring, etc. IT’s role should also be to drive measurable business benefit in partnership with the business. In a purist mindset, however, the “normal IT functions” that IT will need to perform for these Services will approach zero over time. For example, many Office 365 customers are small businesses with no IT staff; they successfully consume Office 365 without a formal IT layer. Clearly, enterprises are different than small businesses, but the assumption should be that over time, IT’s role in SaaS will be in integration and in value-realization, not in day-to-day operations.
Critical Business Applications. These are the N applications that are most important to the business. These are the applications that are easy to identify thanks to the investment that the business is making on them. Normally, one can point to the engineering team for each application—either a dedicated development team or a dedicated team aimed at a commercial-off-the-shelf product. These are the applications that the Board of Directors know by name. In most enterprises, there are about 30 of these critical applications. As an aside, surely, there may be some overlap with “1”; for example, Email may be consumed as a SaaS product and thus will fit into both “1” and “2”, but that is beside the point. These critical applications are where Digital Transformation happens. These critical applications are where DevOps becomes a reality. These critical applications may or may not be built or supported in-house; in fact, the business may drive in their own direction with 3^rd party suppliers in some cases, and that should be ok. As with SaaS, the manual effort required by human beings over time will approach zero thanks to automation and DevOps. For these critical applications, IT’s role is to enable integration with the rest of the IT Portfolio. IT does not necessarily need to own the application(s) or the Service(s) to integrate them.
Generic Infrastructure. If there are 500 applications in the Portfolio and 30 of them are “critical”, what about the other 470 applications? Surely, they are not all the same with respect to business value, so looking at all of the applications in the same way is not advised. But with 470 non-critical applications, it is likely not feasible to look at each application individually. We need to simplify. There should, in the very least, be a gold/silver/bronze categorization, or perhaps a slightly more complex structure. Regardless of the classification scheme used, the underlying infrastructure will eventually be modernized using the public or private cloud. IT will need to drive that modernization, but more importantly, it will need to ensure that the 470 applications and the underpinning infrastructure integrate with the rest of the IT Portfolio. NOTE that one can expect passionate arguments stating that “Application XYZ” is actually mission critical, and there are two questions to ask in that case: i) if application xyz is mission critical, where is the investment? And ii) will it change the points that I am making here if application xyz lands in “2” or “3”? (likely not, so it is not worth the argument)
Traditional Infrastructure. Over time, presumably all applications and underlying infrastructure will fit into categories 1, 2, and 3. If there are applications or if there is infrastructure that does not need to be modernized in the long term, one should question whether or not those applications or infrastructure are of importance to the business. Inevitably though, for now given the fact that the entire Portfolio will not modernize overnight, it is business-as-usual for these applications and for this infrastructure. IT will need to continue to run and to maintain these systems. The key for IT will be to integrate these legacy solutions with the rest of the ever-modernizing IT Portfolio.

So what are the opportunities for IT? For “1”, IT needs to;

operate the services as long as there is still operating to be done,
IT needs to drive measurable business value from the Services within the business groups, and
IT needs to integrate the Services with the rest of the IT Portfolio.

For “2”, IT needs to

deliver the services when called upon to do so, and
IT needs to integrate the Services with the rest of the IT Portfolio.

For “3”, IT needs to

categorize the applications and infrastructure,
IT needs to modernize the applications and infrastructure by classes,
IT needs to operate the modernized applications and infrastructure using the same principles from DevOps as in “2”, and
IT needs to integrate the applications with the rest of the IT Portfolio.

And for “4”, IT needs to

question why the applications still exist if they are not important enough to modernize,
IT needs to keep the Services running until they are modernized or deprecated, and
IT needs to integrate the Services with the rest of the IT Portfolio.

As an aside, the operations aspects of “3” and “4” are increasingly easy to outsource. The repeating theme, however, for every application in the Portfolio is that “IT needs to integrate that application with the rest of the Portfolio.” That integration is broad-reaching from Operations to Security to Compliance to Auditability to Business-to-Business Standards, etc. IT has a tremendous responsibility to facilitate the integration in a seamless and rapid manner. Remember that when we discussed Digital Transformation above, we said that those who win will a) have the best ideas, b) are the best at executing and c) are the best at integrating the transformational services with their existing services. Bullet “c” is where IT has the opportunity and it is where IT has the responsibility to deliver. Unfortunately, most IT organizations are focused either on extending their datacenter with the cloud (maybe to meet decreasing IT budget targets, to close a datacenter, to displace an outsource vendor, etc), or they are focused on transforming their business with digital services. They should do both, and they should be focused on becoming the best-of-the-best with seamless, effortless, rapid Portfolio integration. In fact, every cycle not spent on “enabling the business thru digital transformation within classes 1, 2, and 3” and “enabling immediate, seamless portfolio integration” is a risk to the business because one must assume that the competition is actually focused on those key objectives. Now that we have covered all of that background on how different IT organizations think about cloud, on digital transformation, and on IT Portfolio categorizations and associated opportunities for IT, let us come back to the topic of Office 365. Let us look at Office 365 workloads in light of the two priorities that we have defined for every enterprise IT organization: A) Enable the business through digital transformation initiatives. Have you ever thought of the fact that measurable productivity improvements are transformational? The whole idea with Digital Transformation that we discussed above is to “use technology to make more profit by increasing revenue and/or by reducing costs”. Productivity improvements enable initiatives that drive more revenue, and productivity improvements directly reduce costs by reducing human overhead and by reducing human idle time. The problem has always been measuring and proving the value of productivity improvements. But, thankfully, Office 365 has been designed with measurability in mind (see the usage reporting capabilities of the Office 365 service). There are canned reports, a Graph API, and a PowerBI pack that are all intended to enable IT Pros to measure real impacts on the business. For example, “which departments are using Skype for Business in which ways”? And that data can be joined with business data to answer questions like “as Skype for Business usage goes up, does cost-of-travel-per-employee-per-month go down”? Or perhaps the business may want to overlay project management metadata with the Office 365 use data to answer questions like “are the most successful construction project teams in our construction company leveraging Microsoft Teams more successfully than the less successful construction project teams”? The ability to objectively answer business-productivity questions like these is unheard of, yet Office 365 was built with this sort of Digital Transformation in mind. Office 365 provides a fantastic opportunity for IT to learn-by-doing insofar as driving a Digital Transformation program while planning to show objective measurements of success from the outset. Office 365 also sets IT up with an opportunity to drive end-user behavior which tightens the bond (in a measurable way) between the business groups and the IT team. B) Enable immediate and seamless Portfolio integration. Office 365 was built with this integration in mind. In fact, the Service Management integration aspects of Office 365 are key differentiators for the service. This end-to-end integration includes topics like compliance (enter the Office 365 Trust Center), auditability (enter the features for audit integration), monitoring and NOC integration (enter the monitoring and major incident integration features), Evergreen Management (enter all of the features for Change Integration), and many more. While it is not trivial to integrate any service into the overall portfolio, it is infinitely easier to integrate a service that was designed with integration features built in. Office 365 gives the IT organization the opportunity to “get the integration right” with a service that was designed from the ground up with integration in mind. Microsoft has published a wealth of content to help customers integrate more easily (including this blog series that I am authoring). Microsoft has created an entire Worldwide Consulting organization that is focused on helping customers shorten their learning curve with the integration. My sincere hope is that customers will look at Office 365 as a way to learn what is required for immediate, seamless integration so that they can play that forward to the rest of their ever-evolving portfolio. Given all of that background, in my opinion, Office 365 is strategic to IT and to the business in the two most important ways (A and B above). Unfortunately though, most discussions are simply around features and technology. I am thankful for the opportunity to publish the Modern Service Management view on the strategic importance of Office 365. Let me know your thoughts on Twitter at @carrollm_itsm. As usual, I do not need to be “right” or “wrong” with these posts; my goal is not about achieving planetary agreement. My goal is to spark ideas so that everyone can decide for themselves. There is value in critical thinking, and the stakes are too high for enterprises in today’s world. We all need to be thinking about these critical opportunities. Happy Thinking! And by the way, this IT Portfolio integration discussion will quickly evolve into a Business Portfolio/Business Service integration discussion. I certainly hope that enterprise IT gets it right so that enterprise IT can be the ones guiding (from experience) on the Business Portfolio side of things when the time is right.

Carroll Moon (@carrollm_itsm) has been at Microsoft for over 17 years. He spent 4 years in Microsoft Services focused on service management, and then he moved to what is now the Office 365 product group. In his time in the PG, he led the service management strategy, engineering/development, and global operations for Office 365. Carroll spent 8 years leading Service Management for Office 365 Dedicated, and he spent 2 years bringing the service management “stack” that his team built in Office 365 Dedicated to Office 365 multi-tenant in order to better enable our enterprise customers. Carroll had the unique opportunity to lead teams in moving critical Office 365 capabilities from “on-premise” to Azure. Carroll returned to consulting in late June 2014 with the mission of helping customers shorten the service management learning curve for consuming and providing “cloud” services. Carroll holds 10 patents or patents-pending for Service Management, and he is helping to define “service management for cloud” for the industry: he recently authored a series of articles on Cloud Monitoring along with a Cloud Ops Webinar and Podcast. In April 2017, Carroll participated on an industry-focused panel for DevOps and Digital Transformation at the Software Risk Summit, and he is currently authoring a series for Office 365 Service Management. Carroll lives in Lynchburg, VA with his wife and two children.

Don’t Let Your Cloud Project Grow Up To Be A Failure…

Carroll Moon — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 11:33:32 GMT

I am the luckiest guy in the world. I get to talk to customers every single day about how to move seamlessly to the cloud. I get to talk to our Microsoft Product Groups about features that are needed to help our customers have an ever better experience during and after migration. And I get to talk to our Worldwide Field, including our Consultants, about how to help our customers navigate around possible blockers. Now, I have an opportunity to write this blog post in hopes of passing on some experience to all of our Modern Service Management (MSM) blog readers.

Recently, I was asked for input on a response to a customer who asked “how can Microsoft help me ensure that my cloud project does not fail?”. That led me to quantify the following musings:

1) Failure-level technical failure is not all that common, but I will list it first due to the importance of security and all things that are cyber Cloud migrations themselves seldom fail insofar as the technology is concerned. Moving workloads from point A to point B is an achievable task. It is as simple as moving compute and capabilities from one place to another. Smart technical people work through challenges all the time—it is what they/we do. The challenges with cloud migrations fall in the before and the after. The “before” challenges fall in the technical and philosophical planning—will this be more secure or less secure? will we need to change our network ingress and egress design to accommodate the added traffic to and from the cloud since the compute resources are not in our local datacenters? Those “before” questions are usually technical. Note, however, that I do not intend to diminish the importance of cyber security in any way whatsoever. My point, simply, is that our industry is, by definition, focused on the technology aspects, so those are achievable. The “after” questions are where the most important, yet uncommon questions emerge. Those questions need to be pulled ahead to earlier in the lifecycle—how will I monitor my workloads in the cloud? How will I integrate the alerts and incident workflows for my cloud workloads with my single-pane-of-glass in my Operations Center? How will I audit and report on use? How must I evolve my support and accountability structure given the role-based-access-control capabilities of the cloud? How will I enable continuous integration/continuous delivery of my cloud-born-applications (e.g. automation, machine-learning, and artificial-intelligence next-generation systems) in the cloud while satisfying the compliance requirements of my change and configuration management processes? The list goes on. For the purpose of this blog post, we will focus on the “after” questions; as a reminder, the “after” questions should be predicted, assumed, and pulled ahead in the lifecycle—make the “after” questions “before” questions. 2) End-Users are the second opportunity There are at least four key classes of cloud migrations: a) Moving a workload to the cloud as-is (e.g. lift-and-shift to IaaS) b) Re-writing a workload to really leverage cloud capabilities (e.g. rewriting an app to run on PaaS instead of IaaS) c) Cloud-born application (e.g. a brand new application that would not likely exist without the power of the cloud) d) Moving a workload to SaaS In all four classes of cloud migration, the question that must be asked is “will the end-user experience change”? If the answer is “no”, then you can likely move on to bullet #3. But if the answer is “yes”, then the end-users must be considered. In many projects, the end users should be considered, but they are not considered. When they are considered, they are often considered only with the lens of “how can I avoid help desk calls from these users when I go to production?” But, what we really need to be considering is the business objective of the project in the first place. Why are we doing this cloud project? Are we moving to Office 365 so that our end-users can be measurably more productive? Are we moving our sales application to the cloud so that we can handle holiday spikes via cloud elasticity instead of capital expenditure for on-premise, underused hardware? Are we creating this fancy new IoT, machine-learning based service to transform our industry? Inevitably, there are business goals for the project. Those business goals will only be realized if the end-users effectively use the service(s). So, end-users are the key to successful projects. If they do not use the service effectively, then the business results are not realized, and we fail. It is interesting to realize that the end-user aggregate outcomes are actually the SUM of the results of every individual end-user’s behavior. We need to think about those end-users, and we need to be planful and proactive with how we land any changes on those individuals. And since the prompt for this blog post is “how can Microsoft help me…”, I need to include that response here. Microsoft recommends that customers be proactive and planful with landing the human-element changes on the end users in order to realize the anticipated business value of their projects. To this end, Microsoft has a worldwide consulting practice dedicated to helping customers land that human-element change on the users. The “Adoption and [Human/User] Change Management” practice enables customers with training and consulting based on Microsoft’s experiential learning (along with industry-standards in [human] change management practices) with millions of cloud customers in every industry, vertical and sector. 3) IT Pros are the third opportunity Once you have a plan for the end-users (assuming their experience and/or behavior needs to change), we need to turn our attention to the IT Pros. IT Pros are all concerned about devops and cloudops. Many worry that they will no longer have a job. Many worry that the cloud provider, or the development team in the case of devops, will not have the experience to deliver the capabilities that they are signing up for. Many worry about outages because they inevitably have a wealth of experience supporting the workloads in the environment already, and they know there are nuances that exist because of the technical, cultural, and compliance background of the workloads. IT Management needs to be proactive and planful about painting the future for the IT organization, the IT culture, and for the IT Pros themselves early in the lifecycle of the change. Many cloud migrations, and the desired business outcomes thereof, are based on the promises of agility and cost savings. If the IT Pros push against the cloud (cold) or if they drag their feet (warm), then the value realization will not happen as fast (or at all). Management needs to land the message successfully so that people push towards the cloud (hot) so that the business promises are met on-time or ahead of schedule. Wouldn’t it be a shame to be ready to go into production with a fantastic, new, cloud-born application that will change your business’ market position only to be blocked by your global operations team due to lack of operational readiness? I see it too often. We all need to get in front of the IT org, IT culture, and IT Pro issues.

“How can Microsoft help me…” for this bullet is included with bullet #4 below.

4) IT Integration is the fourth opportunity Most organizations have hundreds or thousands of named applications in their portfolios. They do not move those to the cloud all at once. They move a subset of applications over time. Realistically, if an organization has 1200 applications and moves 1 a month to the cloud, it would take them 100 years to move them all. Thus, it is clear that there will be co-existence for some period of time. It is one thing to operate an application or workload in the cloud. It is yet another thing to operate a cloud workload in concert with the thousands of other workloads in the portfolio without duplicating operational teams, processes, or tools. The integration must be planned where “just enough” changes are made to existing processes, tools, roles, permissions, etc. to enable seamless operations of the cloud workloads. Monitoring, Major Incident Management, Deployment/Change/Release Management, Evergreen Management, Problem Management, Service Desk Readiness, Escalation Protocol, Dependency Mapping, and Workload Cost Accounting are some of the more critical aspects that should be planned. “How can Microsoft help me…”: Microsoft takes the IT Pro and IT operational integration very seriously. Microsoft has formed a Worldwide IT Service Management organization whose charter is to help customers shorten their learning curve with all of the areas covered above with the move to cloud and devops. The ITSM practice is staffed by trained, experienced consultants who are armed with training and intellectual property directly from our product groups. The intellectual property is not only aimed at “how our customers should do things”, but the IP is based on how our product groups actually run the commercial cloud services internally. There is value in the lessons that Microsoft has learned in the > 13 years that we have been doing the cloud since customer 1 for Office 365, and there is value in the lessons that Microsoft has learned in supporting literally millions of tenants on top of our cloud services. The Worldwide, Customer-Facing ITSM practice's entire mission is about taking those lessons directly to our customers using well-trained and experienced cloud operations consultants. The solutions run the gamut from consulting to training to online training offered on the Premier Portal. Of course, there are more ways to fail, and I acknowledge that I have painted with broad brushes here. My intent is not to give an exhaustive list, but rather to inspire everyone to think beyond the normal technical implications. It is very important that enterprises consider the end-user behavior change in order to achieve the desired business outcome. And, it is very important to consider the IT elements—IT organization, IT culture, IT Pros, and IT process and tool integration. Often, in my experience, every technical challenge can be overcome. And thankfully, the end-user and IT elements can be overcome as well, but it is always best to deal with those issues proactively earlier in the lifecycle rather than to wait to address them reactively later.

Get out of the way!

Paul Evert Fijnvandraat — Mon, 06 Nov 2017 15:02:43 GMT

Digital Transformation is happening, it’s the new norm.

There is a growing group of consumers who are always connected. It’s essential for business to interact with these consumers and keep pace with the demands they have, this will be a "make-or-break" transformation.

What is Digital Transformation?

In essence, Digital Transformation is the transition from physical consumer interaction to digital consumer interaction. Some of the major differences between physical and digital interaction attributes are:

any place, anywhere, anytime availability
global competition by default
speed and reliability of value delivery

In essence, value perception of digital consumers shifts from physical to digital. It’s the combination of this digital value perception and the new attributes of digital consumer interaction that require digitization of business processes to keep up with consumer demands and global competition. One of the best examples of a company that embraced and created magic with digital transformation is (Large International Coffee Company). Not only has this company managed to engage customers through social media but also bridged the online and offline customer experience. Another good example is (Coffee equipment company), which engages customers via its website, through mobile, at airport vending machines, and this has helped it to get better sales, productivity, and greater penetration into new markets.

What is wrong with current IT models and why they don’t lend themselves to Digital Transformation

Since the early 70’s there has been an evolution of IT in the enterprise. Once IT systems started to play a major and differentiating role in business processes, it became evident that processes for complete lifecycle of IT needed to be put in place to maintain availability and stability of business processes. It is essential to realize what the precise nature and genesis of current IT process implementations and their purpose are and how these led to the role that IT nowadays tries to play. IT organizations in the past 30 to 40 years used to build, integrate, provision, deploy, operate and maintain environments manually or executed individual scripts manually. Making sure that applications and infrastructure remains available and stable in such an environment, could only be achieved by putting in place stringent policies, instructions, documentation, implementation plans, checklists and approval steps executed by individuals in often individual teams / entities. This in turn caused, that business units handing over applications or changes in applications to such an IT organization, had to wait months before being able to use these applications. The manufacturing industry has experienced this for a long time: manual effort, rigid oversight and individual teams cause a lot of delay, loop backs, waits, queuing, etc.. hence the birth of Lean/Six Sigma to minimize this. The manufacturing industry also already knows that the only true structural solution is to remove the human factor completely and systemically automate the whole process. This currently is possible for repetitive tasks, no one can imagine what the future holds in this space but the recent rise of Artificial Intelligence could potentially make a difference for the remaining none repetitive tasks. In the light of the Digital Transformation of business processes and the level of maturity and autonomy that cloud platforms offer to the business, the role of the existing IT organization in the enterprise needs to be revisited. The old paradigm of “give us your application and we will try to run it on your terms” no longer makes sense for those business processes and applications that need to adapt quickly to customers interacting digitally, expecting instant and up to date services and products. IT organizations not wanting to face this reality end up in a complete and utter disconnect between what the business needs and IT is able to provide. Cloud platforms (like Azure) provide programmatic interfaces to systemic platform automation, but also still provide the possibility to build, integrate, operate and maintain systems manually. Most IT organizations will have a look at this and think …..we can just do our same trick and keep our jobs!. Let’s do that and move applications to the cloud without stepping aside. In fact, current IT organizations need to get out of the way and make way for systemic automation (much alike the manufacturing industry has done). Given the previously mentioned business/IT disconnect, often IT organizations are bypassed by business units completely. These business units just start using cloud platforms without consulting the IT organization, until interfaces to legacy environments are needed and “s**t hits the fan”…! It takes very brave CIO’s/CTO’s, IT managers and employees with a “growth mindset” that enable business units to design, build, integrate, provision, deploy, operate and maintain their applications and code required to configure the required supporting cloud platform services (DevOps + Release pipeline) through programmatic interfaces connected to systemic platform automation and locked down target platform environments (no manual interaction/modification possible for Dev’s and Ops). Once it’s designed, built, integrated and tested, it’s deployed/installed through automation not humans.

Principles of Modern Service Management and how they support Digital Transformation

Microsoft defined a lens to modernize service management, this lens now is called Modern Service Management ©.

“A lens intended to focus ITSM experts around the globe on the most important outcomes that evolve our customers from legacy, traditional IT models toward easier, more efficient, cost effective and agile service structures”

This lens got birth by answering the following hypotheses “what if there would be no IT organization in an enterprise, just business units and cloud services” would there still be something that’s required to do (regulation/policy) or something that has such value that the business (or the company as a whole) wants to pay for it? What it takes to transform IT that support Digital Transformation

assume there’s no central IT organization (shift left)
don’t confuse governance with getting in-between (approval step)
avoid/remove enforcement, organize insight and a-sync governance (manage the exceptions not the regular)
change to Continuous and Autonomous Change for System of Differentiation (Gartner TM) (where DT occurs most often)
let go of certain practices

Some practices on the surface seem like the right idea, problem is they don’t improve or change easily or quickly (full service desk vs. self-service, manual vs. automated/code incorporated testing, etc.) …. Examples of Success Customer Quote:

“Now I’ve implemented this autonomy, the 'IT function' is actually contributing the most value to my business, business units / sales are the new bottlenecks they cannot longer hide behind IT not delivering".

Paul Fijnvandraat started at Microsoft in January 2011 as Technical Presales and moved to Microsoft Consulting Services in October 2013 as Principal Consultant. Prior to joining Microsoft he was Chief Technology Officer on a large outsourcing contract for HP Enterprise Services. He has been working in IT for almost 30 years within various roles. As principal consultant he supports enterprise customers by translating their business and IT objectives into changes needed in their organization, processes, technology and people in complex heterogenic environments. In his own words: "Creating breakthroughs in paradigms, beliefs and behaviors that deliver business value outcomes.”.

Modern Service Management in the Intelligent Cloud

John.M.Clark — Sun, 08 Oct 2017 16:36:27 GMT

Executive Summary

Microsoft’s compelling Intelligent Cloud platform, coupled with our modern approach and perspective on IT Service Management, provides the answers to an often-asked question; Why doesn’t Microsoft have a dominant IT Service Management (ITSM) tool in the marketplace? First, our view on IT Service Management is that traditional ITSM processes and practices haven’t kept pace or evolved over the years and simply do not support and embrace modern capabilities the cloud provides, nor enable the agility and deployment at speed and scale required for digital transformation. More and more Microsoft customers are asking for our assistance to “Transform and Modernize IT”. Secondly, our Intelligent Cloud, Intelligent Edge along with our AppSource marketplace partners do in fact provide a compelling, modern approach for Modern (and traditional) Service Management and IT Asset Management scenarios. All with the capabilities provided in the Intelligent Cloud as shared at IGNITE 2017 by our CEO Satya Nadella –

“…to be multi device and multi sense. You start at one device using speech, you may end in another device using ink. All of the experiences and all of the infrastructure, applications, devices, are going to be infused with AI, natural language, speech, computer vision are all just going to be part of what we do and what we expect.”

The following details how this is accomplished.

The Intelligent Cloud & Intelligent Edge

The cloud is sometimes still viewed and managed through the lens of organizations who incorrectly think it is all disconnected and “siloed”. Microsoft calls our strategy the “Intelligent Cloud” and “Intelligent Edge” for a reason – it assuredly is NOT based on siloed mailboxes, stove piped applications and individual virtual machines. The design intent of the Microsoft Intelligent Cloud is to “empower organizations to unlock greater insights, transform teamwork, and securely enable innovative solutions”. The paradigm of the Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge is multi-device and multi-sense. Everything highlighted in this article is or will eventually be closely unified. For those in the IT organization, IT Service Management (ITSM) represents how IT manages, operates and transitions technology, designs services, and manages risk within the organization. And more often than not, focused operationally and for infrastructure and not full stack applications. Traditional ITSM hasn’t kept pace with rapid changes in modern applications and services, modern application development approaches, proliferation of cloud services, and automation. This isn’t to say it won’t work. But simply put; you won’t achieve the outcomes and value as quickly from innovation and capabilities the cloud provides when managing them with a legacy mindset and approach. Customers and colleagues in the ITSM industry often ask us;

“What impact does the Intelligent Cloud and Digital Transformation have on ITSM?”
“How does the Intelligent Cloud work with or enable IT Service Management?”
“What is meant by Modern Service Management?”

From purely an IT Service Management perspective, Microsoft has been continuously modernizing and evolving how technology is and should be managed. This has driven updated practices and approaches in support of not only our Intelligent Cloud strategy, but in support of Digital Transformation. Transformation that businesses are keen to quickly achieve. Lessons learned have then evolved our approach and guidance from traditional ITSM industry guidance into modern ITSM, also known as; Modern Service Management. A senior Architect within our practice has suggested that Digital Transformation is the culmination of the following seven facts (augmented by this author);

Business must innovate to compete (in their respective industries)
Devices are inexpensive (think IoT)
Compute is powerful and inexpensive (and easily automated)
Storage is inexpensive (and easily automated)
Internet (and network) connectivity is prevalent and inexpensive (and easily automated)
Cloud enables transformational stuff to be at everyone’s fingertips e.g. garage developers now have access to Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence thru the cloud
Agile/DevOps makes it all happen faster (and easily automated)

Does your IT organization embrace and broker these facts? Or stand squarely in the way of them? This is a big change for IT organizations that often struggle to embrace this modern approach. Manually oriented, control-centric, and “technology agnostic” based practices give way to leaner, automated, self-directed improvements that reduce friction, manual efforts, failure demand, and IT inter-mediation -- resulting in greater business value. We came up initially with an internal definition of Modern Service Management; A lens, intended to focus ITSM experts around the globe on the most important outcomes that evolve our customers from legacy, traditional IT models toward easier, more efficient, cost effective and agile service structures. The following is just some of these traditional to modern positions and practices of Modern Service Management; Modern Service Management like any change to an organization and the status quo is challenging. But the outcomes are worth the effort from the successes I know Microsoft and other organizations have experienced... One of my favorite Machiavelli quotes holds very true today when introducing change such as this; "It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things… Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. “ - Niccolò Machiavelli The Modern Service Management content above has been provided for context only. There are plenty of articles, blogs and videos from myself and colleagues and covering this in detail is not the intention of this article. For more information on Modern Service Management check out the reference links at the end of this article...

Enabling Traditional or Modern Service Management in the Intelligent Cloud

How then do we enable, evolve and transition from traditional industry-based ITSM to Modern Service Management? It starts by rethinking the goals and objectives of “Service Management” as well as the platform it executes on. It also starts by understanding what changes when you consolidate and move applications and workloads from on-premise physical/virtual to true private or public cloud. To enable and support both traditional and/or modern IT Service and IT Asset Management capabilities, how does one utilize the Microsoft Intelligent Cloud? It’s simple; Start with the industry leading, recognized modern business application platform Dynamics 365. At Ignite 2017, our CEO Satya Nadella, stated "modern organizations can't be captive to the old way of doing things" in terms of business applications. “Applications need to be more modular and automated than in the past”. The Dynamics 365 Software as a Service (SaaS) Business Application platform, for instance, now offers modular apps that offer limited slices of focused functionality. Also discussed was the promise of "AI-first business applications”, which hinge on artificial intelligence for their core functionality. Microsoft is using our own AI technology to handle online customer service and support inquiries, and other major tech companies are as well. Dynamics 365 is “The next generation of intelligent business applications that help you empower your employees, engage customers, and optimize operations”. Complete solutions such as Customer Care and Field Service are available as part of the platform. In addition, the platform is extended by customers and ISVs at a fraction of the cost of developing an application from the ground up. Dynamics 365 provides the application platform functionality one expects in an industry recognized and industry leading platform;

Software as a Service (SaaS) and On-Premises deployment options
Wizard driven configuration virtually eliminating the need the development, or scripting for forms, workflow, business rules and business process flows, while allowing for advanced development if needed using non-proprietary development skills (Javascript, .Net)
Reporting services for specialized reports, built in user and system Charts and Dashboards from current data, dynamic Excel spreadsheets and pivot tables, and PowerBI for analytics
Microsoft AppSource - an Application marketplace for utility functionality as well as complete business vertical applications
Industry recognized and leading Customer Service Solution that incorporates Microsoft Bot framework and Artificial Intelligence
Responsive portals implemented, modified and extended without advanced web development skills yet flexibility to extend through advanced means if needed
Modern mobile clients on all major mobile platforms and modern application for Windows 10 that allow access to data and functionality similarly available through web experience.
Unified Service Desk client for integration to call distribution systems, transcription of voice from callers, search knowledge and measure sentiment as transcription takes place
Stage based business process flows, workflow and business rules that allow adherence to process steps and activities

The above results in the following capabilities from just the Dynamics 365 platform to support and enable Modern Service Management;

On-premises implementations with consistent functionality that runs in the cloud (Dynamics 365 SaaS receives semi-annual updates). And hybrid implementation options that can locate data in the cloud or on-premises as needed or required.
Reduced backlog of configuration changes to IT and business outcomes within the Dynamics 365 platform
Easy creation of net-new functionality while allowing you to keep your changes separate from those of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Microsoft.
Automated intake through email, chat, portal, social and other interfaces and increased quality of intake through automation - Ability to apply the power of artificial intelligence
Reduced time to value for the configuration and use of self-service portal, including multiple, diverse types of portal identity providers, reducing need to have multiple portals for interaction with external associates, customers, etc.
Responsive mobile portal access for associates/customers
Remote approvals through client or portal interface, and through Microsoft PowerApps.

The story doesn't end with Dynamics 365. The Intelligent Cloud includes Office 365, the most popular cloud based messaging and collaboration platform. Office 365 is seamlessly integrated to Dynamics 365 as one would expect in the Intelligent Cloud. Dynamics 365 and Office 365 are very close family members of the Intelligent Cloud. Minimally, they share the same portal for administration, operations, licensing and support and share Azure Active Directory for identity. Many of the services provided by Office 365 and Office 365 ProPlus are natively integrated to Dynamics 365. Office 365 in fact extends the Dynamics 365 common data service. For example, if you setup meetings with a client or associate, to discuss a request, incident or issue, etc., the case/ticket entity in Dynamics 365 can be automatically linked to the Meeting entity in Office 365. Any entities created beyond what is in Dynamics 365 and Office 365 are available in the common data service. Office 365 working in tandem with Dynamics 365 provides;

Email, scheduling, task and contact management
Automatic SharePoint, Groups and Teams integration to Dynamics 365 which provide simple and easy collaboration and document management among users and non-users of Dynamics 365
Service side and client-side integration to Exchange and Outlook allowing clients to work on Dynamics 365 application within Outlook.
Microsoft Flow and PowerApps integrations to Dynamics 365 for end user “citizen” automation without the need of development skills

The combined capabilities of the above result in the following modern service management scenarios made possible with Office 365 and Dynamics 365;

Integrated groups and team collaboration with associates and resources that are not licensed users in Dynamics 365. Examples include Release / SCRUM Teams, Problem Resolution Teams that have shorter time frames
Reduced cost of Dynamics attachment storage without sacrificing search capabilities. Examples include storing screen shots, documents related to assets or CIs.
The power of Dynamics 365 available while you’re using Outlook on the desktop, web, or phone. Examples include support resources responding through email to support requests or incidents and not having to go into a specific application
Synchronize not only email, but appointments, tasks and contacts as well support work actions and appointments with employees and associates
Ease of creation of After-Action reports in Microsoft Word from an individual record.
Dynamic Excel spreadsheets for synchronized, in most cases up to date reporting, data visualization and analytics. Also provides easy means of importing data from other data sources. Examples include Asset data import, Service and Application analytics.
Ability for regular users to automate their own work scenarios using Flow between Dynamics, their Office 365 account, Project, Visual Studio and many other services, without writing a single line of code.
Configure workflows between your favorite apps and services. Examples include when a Release achieves a certain milestone, automatically create and link a project, or other service item available in Microsoft Flow, get notifications, synchronize files, collect data, and more.

Office 365 and Dynamics 365 provide collaboration and business application capabilities that can then take advantage of services provided in Azure through multiple means of integration. Microsoft Azure is “a comprehensive set of cloud services that developers and IT professionals use to build, deploy, and manage applications through a global network of datacenters. Integrated tools, DevOps, and a marketplace support you in efficiently building anything from simple mobile apps to internet-scale solutions.” And while Azure provides many services and capabilities that appeal to the developer, there are many other services that do not require application development skills to utilize. By no means a complete list, but just some of the services arguably relevant to Modern Service and Asset Management include;

Azure Logic Apps helps you simplify and implement scale-able integrations and workflows in the cloud between Microsoft and non-Microsoft cloud services without scripting or development skills required
Azure Operations Management Suite (also known as OMS) is a collection of management services including Log Analytics, Azure Automation, Backup, and Site Recovery
Azure Automation runbooks run in the Azure cloud and can access cloud resources or external resources that can be accessed from the cloud or on-premise.
Azure Application Insights as an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for web developers on multiple platforms. Can monitor health of Dynamics 365 and other non-Microsoft applications.

The combined capabilities of the above result in the following scenarios made possible with Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365;

Save time by designing complex processes across Office 365, Dynamics 365, Azure and many other services using easy-to-understand design tools and utilize templates to get started quickly. Examples would include integrating Incident Management to Azure Operations Management Suite Log Analytics to analyze failure patterns.
Seamlessly implement patterns and workflows that would otherwise be difficult to implement in code Example: Case/ticket in Dynamics 365 triggers and integrates a Project in Microsoft Project and in parallel an Enhancement project in Visual Studio Online
Customize your logic apps with your own custom APIs, code, and actions. Connect and synchronize disparate systems across on-premises and the cloud
Build off BizTalk server, API Management, Azure Functions, and Azure Service Bus with first-class integration support
Leverage the power of PowerShell to automate activities on-premise and in the cloud Example: Creating a new user in Active Directory and provisioning updated services to that user based on role across a number of services
Monitoring compliance of Windows quality update servicing or monitoring the health of services
Monitoring “externally” and “Internally” the health and performance of applications across technologies and services. Example: Monitoring Dynamics 365 instances for health requires code snippet provided from Microsoft into forms that can then be leveraged by Azure Applications Insight

If you have hung with the article thus far—waiting for the actualization of either modern or traditional ITSM and ITAM data artifacts, workflows and processes—you have arrived… Leveraging all the aforementioned Intelligent Cloud capabilities provided by Dynamics 365, Office 365 and Azure in this article, is an AppSource certified, Global ISV Solution from Provance, Inc. The Provance ITSM & ITAM Solution simply extends Dynamics 365 with the entities (e.g. forms, rules, processes, metrics) and capabilities one expects to find in traditional built for purpose ITSM Solutions and those well known in the marketplace. Now Modern (or contemporary) IT Service and Asset Management processes co-exist with other business applications, utilizing the power of the common data service, Dynamics 365, Office 365 and Azure. Some of the features of the Provance ITSM Solution include;

Addition of eleven (11) Pink Verify™ certified processes including Incident, Problem, Change, Request, Release & Deployment, Knowledge, Service Continuity, Service Portfolio, Service Catalog, Service Level, and Event Management
IT Asset and Configuration Management Included
Integrations to System Center 2016 for existing cloud or on-premise implementation
- Configuration Manager for Asset/Configuration Item management and reconciliation,
- Operations Manager for monitoring, event generation
- Orchestrator for automation.
Native Integration to Azure OMS for monitoring alerts
Automation framework that allows for Azure Automation, Powershell, Orchestrator and 3^rd party automation integration at activity level.
Integration to Visual Studio Team Services or Team Foundation Services for Cloud or On-Premise implementation out of the box (can also be configured using Logic Apps/Flow)
Pre-Configured Self-Service Portal which is modified through Dynamics 365 and portal administration
Pre-configured roles, views, forms, business rules, business process flows, workflows
Templates for all ticket types
Configuration settings housed in data rather than solution for easier administration and promotion to production and data oriented administration federation to non-administrator
Third Party Notification for external suppliers (underpinning contracts)

The combined capabilities of the above result in the following scenarios made possible with the ITSM Solution accelerator, Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365;

Virtually out of the box ITSM and ITAM Solution that is ready for an adapt and adopt approach to implementation but is easily extended as needed for specific requirements within Dynamics 365
Easily import configuration and data from legacy ITSM solutions through simple Excel import (must follow business rules and relationships so no bad data in)
Ability to intake tickets, incidents and service requests through IM Chat (Skype for Business, CafeX), recorded and analyzed voice (in multiple languages) and self-service portal and email
Pre-configured deep ITSM and ITAM analytics available from Dynamics 365, PowerBI and Provance ITSM
Ability to manually or automatically apply templated tickets that pre-populate incidents, requests, changes and problems with values, relationships and activities including automation and approvals.

The "all up" Intelligent, Modern Service Management Solution

What results from all of the above is a natively integrated modern platform for both legacy ITSM processes and procedures, but more importantly a pathway to Modern Service Management patterns and practices that represent where IT organizations need to be in the future to remain relevant to their business. There is a proliferation of ITSM solutions on the market. We see more and more organizations desiring to consolidate and simplify technology, consolidate both internal and external service and support, automate intake and processing, increase levels of self-service and knowledge management, and utilize capabilities such as citizen automation, Release Pipeline, artificial intelligence, machine learning and Bot technology for improving employee/associate productivity and value. This article is intended to simply provide a point of view on how Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge supports not only your overall strategic Digital Transformation, but also supports operational aspects such as IT Service and IT Asset Management. It is important to note that these capabilities may not exist in all regions or government clouds. Additionally, cloud based services may or may not be available for on-premises implementations. For more information contact your Microsoft TAM, Account Executive, or Digital Advisor. You can also contact Provance directly to better understand their IT Service Management solution on Dynamics 365.

Modern Service Management References

Below are just some of the videos, documents and blog articles on Modern Service Management;

Modern Service Management Modern Service Management for Azure Whitepaper Channel 9 Video The Release Pipeline An example of Release Pipeline automation using PowerShell The Release Pipeline Model video Modern Service Management Customer Service and Support Next-Generation Service and Support in a Mobile-First, Cloud-First World, Part 1 Next-Generation Service and Support in a Mobile-First, Cloud-First World, Part 2

AXELOS Blogs on Modern Service Management Service Monitoring Service Outputs Service Monitoring Service Building Trust in the Service Monitoring Service. Making the Service Viral Service Monitoring Application Development Monitoring Service Health. The service monitoring service – rounding it all up

Modern Service Management for Office 365 Modern Service Management for Office 365 Monitoring and Major Incident Management Monitoring: Audit and Bad-Guy-Detection Leveraging the Office 365 Service Communications API Evolving IT for Cloud Productivity Services IT Agility to Realize Full Cloud Value - Evergreen Management Service Desk and Normal Incident Management for Office 365

About the Author

John Clark is a "Modern" IT Service Management Solution Architect in the Microsoft Enterprise Services / Americas IT Service Management practice and Community Lead for the Modern Service Management Worldwide Community. John's contributions to Microsoft have been recognized from being selected as TechReady19 WW Communities Award Winner, member of the Microsoft Services Senior Technology Leadership Program (STLP), and recently achieving 2016 Gold Club. John was formerly President of the Ohio Valley itSMF LIG winning the annual "LIG Of the Year" award during his leadership from itSMF USA. John has extensive background in Technology Management and IT Service Management, as well as Dynamics 365, Office 365, Hybrid Cloud, Azure and System Center. He has published articles in various industry journals, co-authored a book on System Center , and has spoken at various industry tradeshows on ITSM, Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Management and Design.