Microsoft CIO: Dog Food Clouds And Rapid Speeds of Digitalization Taking Place Today

Have you ever heard the saying “eat your own dog food”? I don’t who was the actual author but it’s one Microsoft lives by when it comes of software. In other words they are the beta folks before the beta folks outside the company come along. If you know any Microsoft employees then you know this is true.

This is an interview, and remember the CIO came from GM, so not a long time usual coder as many officers are. Toward the bottom though he makes one comment and I know this is heard clearly around healthcare with CIOs and that is rapid speed at which we are moving today and Mr. Scott clearly make that statement. Healthcare CIOs have many more details and other items to attend to as their data is out data, and no room for avoidable errors. We need to be participants and eat the dog food that we create by all means and be technology participants. At Microsoft they are floating on the clouds and bringing their dog food along with them. BD

I first spoke with Tony Scott in 2003 when he was CTO of General Motors. At the time, the obsession of the day was Web services, which Scott wryly called "an excuse to get people to talk together" about business processes, a role many grand IT initiatives fill.

Today Scott is CIO of Microsoft, a position he's held since Feb. 2008. When I interviewed him just before the holiday, the main excuse for us to talk was the tech industry's current obsession, cloud computing -- and how Microsoft is leveraging its own vast cloud computing infrastructure to serve its employees. We also touched on the consumerization of IT and how he is supporting a glut of new mobile devices.

One of the roles that Microsoft IT plays, and has played for a long time, is to dog-food all of the products that are destined for the enterprise. In the past, that would have meant that when we did a new release of an operating system or a new Office release or whatever, we would start in the very early phases of the development cycle, deploying in very small quantities -- and then over the course of the development cycle, deploying internally at greater and greater scale.

We are on a version of this that will become Office 365. We're dog-fooding that as we speak. But let me be clear -- I don't have the whole company on it yet. It works the way I just explained it: We take a small group and then we go big as the product goes further and further along in its development cycle.

I'm talking about Windows Azure and SQL Azure now specifically, where those limits are far bigger than what you would see in a private cloud scenario.

Scott: Well, I think the big challenge that every CIO is facing today, at least all the ones I talk to, is that businesses are digitizing at a very rapid rate, and this digitization means things are getting much faster, much closer to real time.

We're all in the business of moving information in bits, not in the business of moving atoms, to a greater and greater extent. This is putting new pressure on companies to be faster, more flexible, and more responsive in the marketplace, and to accelerate the pace of development -- to accelerate the pace of virtually everything we do.

There's just a ton of work in every company that I know of to get to these digitization platforms, so it's a pretty exciting time and I think there's a lot Microsoft and IT can do to further that along. That's probably the big ongoing challenge that I see.