What Am I Doing on the Microsoft Enterprise Strategy Team

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Some folks have asked me how is my new role on the Microsoft Enterprise Strategy team different from my old role on the patterns & practices team. 

The short answer is … focus and scope of impact.

Here are some additional quick thoughts …

  1. It’s a shift from a breadth focus of thousands/millions of developers to depth focus with a vital few of Microsoft’s largest Enterprise customers.
  2. It’s a shift from a focus on tech capabilities to a focus on business capabilities and bridging the business + IT gap.
  3. It’s a shift from technical implementation to broader and deeper business impact.
  4. I’m way more focused now on connecting  business capabilities to IT enablers, including product capabilities and features.
  5. Now I need to know the full Microsoft platform stack – not just the Microsoft application platform map
  6. I need to have more of an industry perspective (including key business drivers and trends for the verticals)
  7. I need to have the business language at my finger tips for key verticals, including the key business capabilities and main business scenarios for a given domain.
  8. I need to be able to think through and evaluate an Enterprise’s investment plan and roadmap for reshaping IT, especially as it pertains to cloud.

That said, a lot of things are still the same.  I’m still focused on sharing and scaling expertise.  I’m still focused on principles, patterns, and practices.  I’m still hunting and gathering proven practices.  In this case, it’s really all about patterns & practices for Enterprise Strategy.

My three main priorities right now are:

  1. Making doing Enterprise Strategy more programmatic / systematic.
  2. Figuring out what a cloud Enterprise Strategy looks like and driving an end-to-end repeatable approach.
  3. Shaping the prescriptive guidance platform across the business and IT continuum.

To make Enterprise Strategy more “executable” and to pave the way for prescriptive guidance, I’m in the process of building out a backlog of user stories for doing Enterprise Strategy engagements.

Separately, but related, I’m also building out a backlog of user stories for Cloud Strategy.  I’ll share those in the near future, both for feedback and to share the most effective way I’ve found to share user stories with many people in an iterative and incremental way.