We are witnessing the beginning of the next big leap in productivity. Generative AI is primed to significantly accelerate our creation and synthesis of content, freeing time to focus on more creative, thoughtful and impactful work.
As the de facto standard among productivity suites, the ubiquity of Microsoft 365 places Microsoft 365 Copilot in a unique position to bring GenAI capabilities to employees directly within their existing workflows faster, and with built-in governance and security features that homegrown options may lack.
However, getting your environment ready and enabling your teams to benefit from Microsoft 365 Copilot will still require planning and a thoughtful rollout. Dell Technologies is a longtime Microsoft partner, and we are uniquely equipped to help organizations unlock the potential of Microsoft 365 Copilot, with a strategy to:
- Prepare your data, including security and compliance considerations
- Enable the right set of users
- Measure what matters, establishing productivity baselines before you begin
Get Your Data Ready
Beyond meeting the prerequisites and technical guidelines released by Microsoft, which outline specific needs in terms of licensing, data privacy and security, data hygiene and tenant management, you will need to prepare your data to be accessed by Microsoft 365 Copilot, ensuring secure but broad access to business information.
The more information Microsoft 365 Copilot can reference, the more useful it will be. The quality of outputs will be better if Microsoft 365 Copilot can tap into the data and signals between all your Microsoft services, including data residing in SharePoint and OneDrive repositories.
The centerpiece of these signals is the Microsoft Graph, a unified interface and map for accessing the wide range of interconnected data and services within the Microsoft 365 suite. Your organization can give Microsoft Graph a strong foundation by structuring content optimally and ensuring your most important and relevant content is moved to the Microsoft cloud. This evaluation should include ensuring stale content is archived and incomplete drafts are organized in a way that can be easily excluded from Microsoft 365 Copilot visibility.
Data permissions and security will also be critical to Microsoft 365 Copilot readiness. Businesses will need to closely evaluate permissions to make sure users have access to the “right” amount of content, preventing sensitive company data from being inadvertently made available to the wrong audiences.
Taking a carefully balanced approach to managing permissions—not too much, but not too little—will boost results while mitigating the risks of excessive access. Compliance tools, such as Microsoft Purview, can be used to assess your data and control visibility using labels, policies and tags.
Put Microsoft 365 Copilot Into the Hands of the Right People
We believe GenAI can have a meaningful impact on the entire workforce. Some roles, however, will realize greater productivity gains from Microsoft 365 Copilot. It is important to identify which users and work styles within the organization will benefit most and prioritize these employee personas for access to Microsoft 365 Copilot.
As general guidance, employees that create and synthesize content will likely benefit most in the initial use cases of Microsoft 365 Copilot. Marketing and product teams, for example, can use it to accelerate creation of artifacts and discover insights and correlations much more rapidly.
After identifying your priority users and their needs, one of the most significant aspects of Microsoft 365 Copilot effectiveness will be ensuring they are equipped with the knowledge and ability to effectively use it within their applications. A thoughtful communication and training plan, tailored to user roles and inclusive of prompt engineering concepts, is necessary as a part of a larger adoption and change management program. We also recommend creating a champions network to facilitate peer collaboration.
Measure the Effectiveness of Your Investment
As with every major technology investment, organizations need a way to track and measure the impact of GenAI. Since Microsoft 365 Copilot is designed to improve productivity, businesses need to establish a productivity baseline as a key point of reference before implementation.
To effectively measure such a nuanced concept as productivity, businesses should consider both quantitative and qualitative measurements. Formal experience measurement programs yield the best results from the quantitative side, since they align initial vision with desired outcomes.
The native tools within Microsoft 365 are a good starting point for basic insight. Microsoft’s adoption score and usage analytics, for example, can help quantify how your organization performs work across pre-defined productivity categories and technical experiences. Microsoft Viva Insights is another solution that can provide useful productivity metrics.
However, measuring sheer output will not by itself yield a meaningful baseline. Qualitative analysis is important and can be addressed with sentiment measurement, which typically involves non-intrusive survey tools that ask users simple questions post-rollout.
This analysis can help determine how much time Microsoft 365 Copilot has saved employees when creating new presentations, for example, or how helpful the technology has been to reduce time spent reading and responding to emails. My recommendation is that even sentiment questions should be quantitative in nature—ask how much time was saved instead of if time was saved.
To help businesses with this process, Dell provides Digital Employee Experience services to establish baseline measurements and monitor the impact of technology change on their organization.
Are You Ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot?
As organizations consider investing in Microsoft 365 Copilot, we advise beginning readiness activities early in order to hit the ground running with this game-changing technology.
Dell Technologies is an end-to-end solutions provider ready to assist with Microsoft 365 Copilot readiness, including licensing agreements for Microsoft 365 Copilot and other Microsoft software products. Once licensed, Dell Services is here to help prepare both your environment and employees for generative AI and Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Our comprehensive readiness plans include technical guidance, data governance considerations, adoption strategies and more to help your business take full advantage of emerging technologies as quickly as possible. Get in touch now to get started.
