Microsoft–UK, Chief Data Officer: A Lot of Our Solutions Are Developed for In-House Needs

Author:

Published on:

May 27, 2022, 6:00 pm

(Europe) Robin Sutara, Chief Data Officer, Microsoft–UK speaks with Della Shea, Chief Data Governance and Privacy Officer, Symcor, and CDO Magazine Editorial Board, about her professional journey and Microsoft’s approach to developing products for its customers.

Sutara has spent almost 23 years at Microsoft across various roles. She joined as a support for Internet Explorer 5 on Windows 3.1 and ultimately went on to an enterprise-scale support role for automotive manufacturers as they implemented Microsoft technologies.

Next, she moved to the business operations and business management side, supporting Microsoft’s first foray into cloud services during the early days of the cloud’s first evolution. That is also when Sutara landed her first data job, an opportunity to have a team of data analysts that looked at customer and partner data along with external analysis. It was to look at ways for Microsoft to transform customers’ business, leveraging data to rethink licensing models, account team relationships, and other aspects of delivering for some of the organization’s biggest enterprise customers.

“It was a really interesting journey at that point. We were going through an internal transformation. It was really interesting to watch us go from an environment of “what is the data telling us?” in a reporting type of function, to “how do we actually learn from the data and start to act and drive things differently through people, process, operational efficiencies, etc.,?” Sutara says.

Next, she took on a business role as the Chief Operations Officer for Azure data engineering and later came to the U.K. as Chief Data Officer for one of Microsoft's first subsidiaries in the world.

Speaking on the usage of data analytics to inform the development of products and services, Sutara notes that it’s an interesting process. “Microsoft has always taken a first-party to third-party approach. A lot of the technology solutions that we provide to our customers are actually developed in-house, to solve our own business technology needs, and the necessity.” Cosmos DB, a global cloud-based innovation database, was actually created to solve for Microsoft products like XBox, Teams, and Skype as they had to be real-time, and it had to be the same experience globally.

Similarly, Purview, Microsoft's governance platform, was originally developed to solve Microsoft’s own GDPR compliance and to ensure that it had a good catalog with classifications of data assets across the organization.

“It was always interesting to see how much customers shape the roadmap for Microsoft based on this first-party service. It has always been open dialogue with customers, truly allowing the data we receive from them on how they use the services and where they feel the gaps are, to really influence that,” Sutara concludes.