From Disney to 'dogfooding': Life as Microsoft's CIO
Published: 17 Sep 2008 12:06 BST
Microsoft chief information officer Tony Scott took some time to chat with ZDNet.co.uk's sister site, CNET News.com, while he was in San Francisco for an environmental conference recently.
Scott moved from Disney to take Microsoft's top IT job earlier this year, and CNET was keen to hear his thoughts on how he likes being a guinea pig for every new Microsoft product that comes down the line.
One of Scott's main missions — and that of his predecessors — is a process called 'dogfooding', in which Microsoft becomes a major customer for every new product that comes down the pipeline.
Scott said he doesn't see that mission changing, but he did say he wants to shift that role so Microsoft's experience, at least some of it, better reflects what its customers go through.
Q: You've been in the job for a few months now. I'm curious to get your thoughts on what it's been like.
A: It's been an interesting transition. I was chief information officer at Disney for three years before coming to Microsoft. I thought I would be there forever. So this all came about kind of suddenly.
The CIO at Microsoft really has three roles. One is to do all the classic IT stuff that probably every CIO at every company does. There's the role of working with our product groups where we do the 'dogfooding'. And then there's working with our customers, because everyone who comes to Microsoft wants to know: 'How does Microsoft do it?'
What I am trying to do is improve our world in all three areas. On the dogfood side, I think this is where maybe I bring some value as an outsider. I've been going to Microsoft for years... What I was always disappointed in was the relative degree to which Microsoft could talk to us as external CIOs about what the upgrade experience was like.
It turns out the reason why most of the former CIOs couldn't talk about that is that, internally, Microsoft used a very different process than what customers would use.
We are going to take some segments of the company and use them to experience what customers experience
We never historically went from production bits to production bits in terms of the upgrade process. We went through a series of betas.
One of the changes I am trying to bring is — we'll still do all the dogfooding; we'll still do all the betas — but we are going to take some segments of the company and use them to experience what customers experience and go through the normal upgrade process. I think by doing that we can be more relevant to the ultimate consumers of Microsoft's products.
Everybody thinks Microsoft runs all on Microsoft and there is no other stuff there. That turns out just not to be true. We're predominately Microsoft but not exclusively. I want to take some of the learnings we have in those other environments... and make those experiences relevant to our customers.
I'd say what I am trying to do is small changes like that. This isn't a sharp right turn in terms of IT strategy but it is trying to make what we do inside Microsoft more relevant to our customer base.
What was the biggest surprise when you actually got into the job versus what you expected?
I think the complexity of the company was startling. Disney was a very big company. I thought of Microsoft as a big software company and I expected it to be more like General Motors was or maybe even Sun when I used to work there.
I didn't fully appreciate all the complexity of the company — the breadth of products, the different ways in which the company markets itself, distributes, supports, consults... There was just a lot more complexity there than I realised as an external customer.
Some of your predecessors also had to run Microsoft Online, selling services. You don't.
It's an interesting model. We run all of Microsoft Mail on the services we sell to customers. So, I have very few people in the IT organisation that directly work with the mail, although it's a service we obviously provide to all Microsoft employees.
Right now, the mail we use is kind of an outsourced-but-insourced model. We're going to also launch soon the mail-in-the-cloud service, which will be…
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