Future Proofing Your Business to Overcome Challenges and Meet Opportunities
Joacim Damgard
President, Microsoft Western Europe
Streamline, secure and grow your business with simplified digital transformation
Leaders and organizations are expected to navigate the challenges of the modern business environment by ensuring the right digital transformation happens.
This is not a new topic, but even today, there is still a huge amount of complexity and cost in managing multiple vendors and third-party solutions to enable this transformation.
Now, with the explosive growth of generative AI, leaders have another element to consider and 79% agree that their company needs to adopt AI to stay competitive. But the transformative journey that organizations need to take to realize the value involves more than just adopting a technology.
Streamlining how your business enables digital transformation doesn’t have to be complex or prohibitively costly. You just need to focus on three areas: effective use of data, securing your organization and improving collaboration both internally and with customers.
Getting the Most Out of Your Data
Many leaders understand that they can gain a competitive edge by extracting insights from their proprietary data. Research suggests that in about two years, businesses that successfully adopt a data-led approach will generate more than 25% of their revenue from digital products and services.
Global pharmaceutical leader Novo Nordisk is doing just this with Azure DevOps and GitHub to create a one stop shop to help research and speed up product development.
“We’re early in our research collaboration platform (RCP) journey, but we’re already able to bring scientific innovation across different clinical and academic partners.” – Ramneek Gupta, Digital Director in Global Drug Discovery in Novo Nordisk Research and Early Development
But having great tools is just the first step. The real magic happens when everyone in your organization can use them. BI tools used to be the domain of data analysts and IT pros but now, with self-service platforms, everyone can access and analyze data.
I love this example from Ferrovie Dello Stato Italiane, Italy’s national railway company. After adopting Microsoft 365 E5, they now use Power BI Pro to optimize processes and workflows. Data insights and analytics have enabled both onsite and remote evaluations, transforming maintenance practices and benefiting everyone involved.
“The digitalization of old processes that we’re carrying out, is crucial to reaching a range of targets, from efficiency to cost savings,” – Luigi Evangelista, Director of Infrastructural Projects Division at Italferr
Combine this with generative AI through Copilot in Power BI, and every employee becomes supercharged. Using conversational language, employees can ask Power BI to create visuals, reports and insights that inform decisions and reach better business outcomes faster.
To achieve this, businesses need a unified digital infrastructure. By consolidating a patchwork of legacy systems into a single, comprehensive suite, I’ve seen how businesses can cut costs and simplify their operations.
Streamlining in this way doesn’t just save money – it also makes your data processes more efficient. Take Power BI, for example: it’s shown to deliver a 321% return on investment over three years, with a payback period of under six months. That’s a win-win. And when you consider that it is a crucial step to being able to maximize the impact of GenAI as well, it becomes a win-win-win.
Securing Your Business
Once you’ve maximized the value of your data, you have to keep it secure. In a data-first world, the evolving threat landscape presents challenges that go beyond the IT department.
A strong cybersecurity strategy can enhance your organization’s security posture and significantly reduce data breach risks. Effective security tools can lower breach likelihood by up to 50%, streamline incident response, and allow your security team to focus on proactive threat detection and value-adding activities.
Erste Group Bank AG are one of Central and Eastern Europe’s largest financial service providers. They chose to upgrade from Microsoft 365 E3 to E5 to improve their security, and have benefited from greater flexibility and faster collaboration, also improving customer care and banking services.
“It offers us more flexible and faster processes to improve our customer care and banking services. Given the sensitivity of our business, data storage under the highest security and compliance standards is our top priority,” – David O’Mahony, COO Erste Group.
With a strong security posture and streamlined management, businesses are prepared to adopt generative AI tools, which can enhance cyber resilience by allowing cybersecurity professionals to focus on strategic rather than reactive tasks.
Among our preview customers, security analysts reported time savings of 40% on core tasks and 60%-time savings on reporting. This means they can spend more energy on threat hunting and proactive defensive strategies.
Driving Collaboration and Customer Service
With intense competition for customer acquisition and retention, organizations must invest in advanced analytics to keep up with increasing customer signals, deliver real-time personalized service, and enhance customer loyalty.
But it’s not just about customer-facing tech. Internal collaboration plays a huge role in the quality of service you provide. According to our latest Work Trend Index, users spend 60% of their time on emails, chats, and meetings and just 40% in creation apps like Word and PowerPoint. That’s a lot of time devoted to collaboration. So how do we make it better?
The University Children’s Hospital Basel (UKBB) adopted the full Microsoft 365 E5 suite to add flexibility and scalability to its IT operations. This transition enabled the hospital to improve internal communication and free up time for staff to devote to patients.
“Cooperating with Microsoft leaves the hospital ideally equipped for the digital future of medical care.” – Sebastian Fernandez, Head of ICT service provider at UKBB
Combining call, chat, and meeting capabilities on a single platform fosters a more collaborative and efficient team environment. This approach saves time and money while ensuring reliable service, enabling personalized and effective interactions that customers love.
When you add GenAI into the mix through Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service, you can enable your employees to track interactions, find solutions faster, and help them deliver consistent, high-quality service across the board.
Bringing it all together with Microsoft 365 E5
Replacing outdated communication, data and security systems with modern integrated solutions can lead to significant cost reductions and streamlined processes.
To tackle the challenges of today and seize the opportunities of tomorrow, businesses need to adopt comprehensive, integrated technology solutions. This drives efficiency, improves business processes, improves cyber resilience and sets you up to supercharge your business with generative AI tools.
