M365 Alignment Lacking in Most Organizations

Written By John Mancini

This is the second in a series of blog posts about the findings in a new MER Merlin report on automated governance in M365. The first post focused on understanding the context in which organizations are grappling with their M365 deployments -- A rising tide of information chaos.

In this post, I make the case that the alignment of business, information governance, and M365 governance strategies is increasingly critical → But is sorely lacking in most organizations.

Downloads of the report are free -- and private -- at THIS LINK. We won’t be handing off the names to anyone. We greatly appreciate the following underwriters, who made it possible to do this; I urge you to check out their offerings.

Download link for the report = https://mailchi.mp/merconference.com/merlin-m365

[For reference, the indented quotes in this post were made by an expert panel of end users; more detail on that can be found in the report.]

In 2021, the Intelligence Unit of The Economist (IT’s changing mandate in an age of disruption, underwritten by Appian Software) considered the current state of business/IT alignment in light of the challenges generated by the pandemic. Among their conclusions:

  • The pandemic has shone a harsh light on the shortcomings of existing IT systems.

  • Capacity is a significant source of apprehension.

  • IT teams’ control over their organizations’ digital infrastructure and strategy is slipping.

  • Collaboration between IT and non-IT teams is strong, but many believe that their organizations would benefit if collaboration was stronger. Data is an area of particular strain.

  • The technologies seen as most important to the success of organizations over the next 12 months are cloud computing, AI and machine learning, data science and analytics, and automation.

  • Executives have mixed views on whether they possess the skills to address the challenge.

Leading edge organizations are now not only thinking about how to better align business strategy and IT strategy, but how to extend the alignment even further into information governance, and more specifically M365 governance. The explosion of remote work necessitated by the pandemic accelerated this journey. Organizations suddenly woke up to the business imperative of automating how they govern information, regardless of where users are located or where content is created.

During the pandemic, M365 capabilities -- and especially Microsoft Teams -- were deployed rapidly and without a lot of planning, out of the sheer necessity of getting “something” in place. The good news in all of this is that the pandemic finally woke up many senior executives to the need to manage their organization’s information more strategically.

As a result of the pandemic, organizations have begun to think more strategically about information and records governance and the role of M365 in their overall IT strategy. In particular, large organizations (over 1,000 employees) are in a better position post-pandemic to truly understand the key drivers for governance: regulatory compliance, privacy, security, cost, and process transformation. The opportunity now is to translate this increased awareness into actionable plans, which in most cases means using the levers that the executive suite cares about as a backdoor to achieve information governance ends.

“We’ve had 30 years of every employee creating hundreds of files every month. It’s not enough to talk about retention and disposition.  These are not the buzzwords that get projects funded. When I talk about information chaos, I think privacy, data minimization, and cybersecurity are all in the same bucket. Privacy, data minimization, and cybersecurity are more important at the executive level than retention and governance and records management. Positioning what I do against these corporate priorities has helped me and my team to get more visibility and attention – and funding.”

“The number one driver for me is the dollars and cents associated with the storage contract. And the idea that for every dollar and cent I save the return on investment is adding value back to the organization, especially in terms of compensation for people who deserve it.”

“Our value drivers in information management seem to have always focused on risk avoidance. That makes it difficult to show value added when you're in there competing for money for projects. Risk management is a big piece of what we need to focus on in information management. In addition, we partner closely with our data privacy folks, because they have the ear of the senior leaders.”

Infotechtion offers this framework for aligning business, IT, and M365 strategies:

Step 1: Vision -- Establish an information management vision which aligns with your business objectives. Identify business priorities for the next few years (e.g., improve customer engagement, reduce operational costs). Develop an information management vision to support the business objectives (e.g., connecting people, information, and knowledge with transparent and inherent security and compliance).

Step 2: Critical Success Factors -- Determine critical success factors for achieving your information management vision. Do an information management maturity assessment to document the current situation (as-is situation), but also to identify what the business thinks should be improved (to-be situation). Determine critical success factors based on the results (e.g., better information availability, completeness, and trustworthiness).

Step 3: Requirements -- Determine use cases that need to be supported. Identify, prioritize, and group use cases that need to be supported instead of wasting time on documenting a long list of must-have and should-have requirements that quickly will be out of date. Identify legacy systems that no longer align with your business objectives, and the business processes that will benefit from consolidating legacy systems or replacement with modern technology.  

Step 4: Blueprint -- Determine the foundation for success. Determine required frameworks and technologies to meet your requirements and critical success factors (e.g., corporate metadata with master data values, site configuration with default metadata that information inherent, retention labels to automate records management, sensitivity labels to automate information protection, governance roles for continuous improvement).  

Step 5: Establish a plan with quick-wins. Create a plan for improvement -- get the foundation in place, run proof-of-concepts for different use cases, be fluid to demonstrate value to the business, and fast-track the transition. Establish criteria for business units to buy or build business applications on top of the platform.

Step 6: Business Case -- Determine the business benefits of change.  Document the business benefits of the above, including the potential savings from retiring legacy ECM systems.

Download link for the report = https://mailchi.mp/merconference.com/merlin-m365.

John Mancini
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M365 Governance and Information Chaos